By

Vishnuguptha

“The marathon can humble you.”

~Bill Rodgers, winner of four Boston and four NYC marathons:

When the Al Qaida planes stormed themselves into the soaring twin-towers of the World Trade Center in New York, a sea-change occurred in the American psyche. A hitherto complacent American was confronted, more with the enormous potential of the wrath and anger of an Islamic fanatic than the actual capability of a yet-undetermined fire-power of an angered adversary.

They responded with an equal quantum of anger and determination which were in today’s real terms, much more telling than the power of the bows and arrows of the ancient world of Romans and Greeks or for that matter, even the Chinese and Indian Empires. What was even more evident was the outpouring of empathy, not sympathy as in an average Asian or Oriental people, towards a city and her people and the collective American mindset that was embedded in its own all-powerful invincibility.

Although a flawed foreign policy of the debacle in Vietnam and Indo-China was forgotten by the world at large and was only a faint remembrance in whom it remained a memory if at all, the ‘bombers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’ were awakened to a new reality of being accused of grave injustice dispensed out to the hapless Palestinians in the Middle-East and ever-so-suspecting millions in the Third World. That suspicion was a direct result of the ruthless and relentless propaganda carried out by the then Soviet Union and her allies.

The frightening visuals of the 9/11 massacre, showing live people jumping off from twenty, thirty stories-high towers stirred many otherwise tranquil minds and hearts of millions of fellow Americans and served another useful purpose of uniting a people who were divided along the Republican and Democratic party lines, behind an otherwise lackluster Administration led by Georg W Bush. In a real sense, 9/11 gave a buttressing effect and impetus to a faltering government apparatus headed by and revolving around the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld axis.

President Obama’s speech for victims of Boston bombing

The maddening military policies followed by the Bush administration are a totally different story. That policy created the Iraq war and the senseless civilian massacres.It came in the invasion’s aftermath, painting a completely adverse and negative picture of the ‘Ugly American’s neo-conservative military strategy whose original source is the fast-waning Republican all-white ‘invincibility mindset’.

Furthermore, this war was primarily fought on a ‘credit card’ in a sense because at the time the United States embarked upon this ill-fated military campaign, her debt burden was increasing almost on a daily basis. The fate of this unhealthy mindset was more or less sealed in the recently concluded Presidential Elections of 2012 at which the incumbent Barak Obama won a very comfortable victory against a financial plutocrat like Mitt Romney whose political platform became progressively regressive in the days close to the elections.

Nevertheless, the American public’s reaction to the 9/11 disaster was manifestly unlike that of a Third World nation which is usually steeped in so-called tradition and restricted by what Tagore described in his celebrated, Nobel Prize-winning collection of verses, “Gitanjali’, as ‘narrow domestic walls’.

The extraordinarily positive response on the part of the American people of all colors and ethnic backgrounds buttressed the argument that United States of America is no more a set of States united in a plural sense but a real United States of America as a singular nation, in the face of peril and immeasurable challenge. The lessons learnt after the 9/11 tragedy were many and they were apparently well learnt and corrective measures are being implemented without qualification- an appropriate way of a modern society making advances in the changing dynamics of a changing world.

The year Two Thousand Thirteen is a totally different year, not only for Americans but also for the world at large. Bogged-down in Iraq and yet sustaining an unwinnable war in Afghanistan made the Bush Administration ever more unpopular and coupled with the growing non-white voter bloc in the electorate that led to it cornering itself into an unwinnable place in the political spectrum, the Republican Party faced its Waterloo when the economic meltdown occurred at the end of the Bush Administration in 2007/2008.

The era of Obama presented a totally different culture to the broader America. The white-only mentality that pervaded during the preceding decades began receding before one’s very eyes and a definite tinge of liberalism shaded the national conversation; the liberal media outlets, led by MSNBC and the regular networks, like CBS, NBC and ABC came out of their shells and openly talked about liberal issues without a fear of being persecuted by the conservative commentators led by their radio personalities and FOX News.

With Obama’s liberalism on a steady march, specially with Affordable Care Act (dubbed by the conservative media as Obamacare) in place, another fresh political spectacle was born-the Tea Party Conservatives- whose libertarian philosophy took root, especially in the so-called Red States, catapulting them into power in the House of Representatives, thereby upsetting the Democratic majority and giving the Republican Party a faint hope of making Barak Obama an essentially a one-term President. But they were sadly mistaken as was shown in the 2012 Elections.

The steady yet slow recovery of the economy gave no comfort to the Obama Administration. The clarion call for making Obama a one-term President gathered strength with each passing week and month. When the Presidential Elections approached, the Republicans and fellow conservatives, led by FOX News and the conservative radio propaganda machine, truly believed that they had more than a fifty-fifty chance at ousting the incumbent Obama. But the election results proved otherwise.

The Republicans and their ardent supporter-base were terribly disappointed. Obama’s comfortable victory not only reaffirmed the country’ definite slant towards liberal policies and principles, it also proved that the new sets of demographics are dictating the outcome of elections and it would be apparently irreversible once it begins its relentless journey.

The increase in the Latino vote-bank coupled with the expansion of the Asian component were heavily inclined towards the Democrats and Obama and the chilling signals that it sent through the Republican circles are still reverberating; the utter confusion that still prevails among the Republican elites is slowly approaching the fringes and according to some well-informed pundits, is threatening a civil war among the various groups within the Republican Party itself. It would certainly take some time before the proverbial dust settles but in the meantime a defeat at the vote in the Senate for the Gun Control Act, a rearguard action taken by some ultra-right Senators may have given a false sense of hope to the Republicans.

The Gun Control Act suffered its fate on the Patriots Day, when one of the key centers of USA – in fact ‘the seat of learning’ in America – Boston, Massachusetts celebrated its age-old tradition of the ‘Boston Marathon’. On that day, at the very center of the Marathon, the end-line of the Race, two explosions shook not only those who were watching the finale of the Race but the entire nation to its foundations, yet again like on September 11, 2001 in New York.

The whole country was engulfed once again by fear and anxiety; the manhunt began and within 72 hours, after keeping the whole country abreast of the developments of the investigation on a minute-to-minute basis, they managed to hunt down one culprit and at the time this piece is being written, all signals are that the other culprit too will be caught sooner rather than later.

Am I just mad or crazy to lay out before the local reader, the details of a terror attack that took place tens of thousands of miles away from our Island? No. The very openness of the investigation, the very professional way the whole episode is being handled, the very transparent methods utilized by the law enforcing authorities in the USA present one with a text-book case for any country to follow. And the unequivocal support and loyalty the people, irrespective of their individual political affiliations, show towards their Government is equally significant in that every effort is being made by the authorities so that the faith that the people have in their system of governance is reaffirmed over and over again.

The stark difference between that American reaction and that of Sri Lanka’s authorities, the Police and politicians alike, to the broad daylight murder of the beloved journalist Lasantha Wickrematunga, the disappearance of Prageeth Ekneligoda and the numerous attacks on the Uthayan newspaper outlet in Jaffna is very significant. They are all going unanswered and unattended and unsolved. That is the real tragedy; that is the real lesson that we need to learn from the USA.

Well the explanation may be simple. The USA is being governed by a system wherein resides a real and clear-cut division of power between the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary. It’s headed by an educated legal luminary in the class of a Harvard Law School Professor, Barak Obama.

Do you want to know any more reasons? The pleasure of handing that opportunity to you is entirely mine!