A Comment on President Obama's Cairo Address
Doug Worthington ( Ethiopia 1963-65) writes: “As I listened to Obama’s sensitive and culture-bridging talk in Cairo, I tried to imagine myself as a returned PC volunteer giving a similar speak. I think each of us, having travelled and lived aboard, could have given a similar speech. Obama seemed like a PCV to me. In a sense, he has had the Peace Corps experience. He sees the world from a different perspective than does the average American.”
Well said, Doug!
The best perspective to understanding Obama and his apparent affinity with a Peace Corps mentality is his mother.
For a good look at her, TIME, April 9, 2008 which begins:
“Each of us lives a life of contradictory truths. We are not one thing or another. Barack Obama’s mother was at least a dozen things. S. Ann Soetoro was a teen mother who later got a Ph.D. in anthropology; a white woman from the Midwest who was more comfortable in Indonesia; a natural-born mother obsessed with her work; a romantic pragmatist, if such a thing is possible.”
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1729524,00.html
Stanley Ann Duncan Soetoro was better at most everything than the rest of us.
Tom Hebert