Yareah Magazine

Charles Kinney Jr.

 I'm always humbled when I stand in this space.  It has the feel of a playful church.  There's a hushed atmosphere, but the space, even with the heaps of cold technology, is incredibly human.  Children play while adults reverently look at the screens.  I contemplate each display and wonder what made these people give so much; what made them evolve into what they eventually became.

  I'm sure they didn't intend to become great.  I'm even more sure they had secrets which would make us think they were very human.  Somehow, though, their ethics evolved into the highest virtues of humanity: self-sacrifice, the struggle against inequality and adversity, and the pursuit of peace.
 There's one screen I always pause at in veneration: Dag Hammarskjöld.  In 1961, he was the posthumous winner of the Peace Prize.  A Swedish diplomat, a son of a prime minister and the second secretary-general of the United Nations, Hammarskjöld died in a plane crash attempting to make peace in the Katanga crisis.  When I was a boy, I was fascinated by the name HAMMARSKJÖLD.  It sounded exotic, Scandinavian and powerful.  As a young man looking for gay-identified (or possibly gay) heroes, I studied Hammarskjöld.  He evolved into a complex man who gave his life, whether by destiny or through personal ethics, to the service of humankind.

 I read Markings, a collection of Hammarskjöld's writings that was published in 1963.  Even as a young adult, I could understand his battle between human desire and ethical service.  Hammarskjöld had ethics, in abundance.  Hammarskjöld wrote, “No peace which is not peace for all, no rest until all has been fulfilled.”  His ethics evolved from a quiet boy in Uppsala to an unselfish man who most likely was assassinated in the pursuit of peace.

 President Obama comes to Oslo on December 10 to accept the Nobel Peace Prize at Oslo Rådhus (Oslo City Hall).  In a hilarious but respectful recent Jib-Jab video parody of “Super-Obama” (http://sendables.jibjab.com/originals/hes_barack_obama), the president tackles health care, the economy, climate change, pirates, and even saves kittens in trees.  The parody flashes the news HOPE IS HERE!  Hope is a fragile thing, even if it's false.  Obama receives the Peace Prize not so much for what he has done, but what he has the possibility of doing.  That's hope.  Obama's evolving.  Some would say that the presidency of the United States isn't the place to evolve.  Hammarskjöld, and the Nobel Peace Prize committee, might have thought differently.  After eight years of another American president whose ethics evolved into disaster, the world could do much worse.

Read more about Charles Kinney Jr.

http://charleskinney.blogspot.com

Read more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Peace_Prize

*Yareah magazine es una revista cultural fundada y dirigida por el escritor Martín Cid: http://www.martincid.com
**Created and edited by the writer Martin Cid: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

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