Yarning for Eagle’s Vision: “Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize: Anything Wrong With It?”

From my childhood, consciously or unconsciously, I think I have had some kind of yarning for “distinguished humanbeing” with “Eagle’s Vision.” I am not sure what kind of yarning it had been. Whether I wanted to meet him in person or just quietly observe, witness his path of life to greatness in distance (I am not sure even what kind of greatness I was looking for). Probably it was not about meeting the person, because I am not enthusiastic about putting up good face, acting up, enthusiastically shaking hands or hugging, and being proud of meeting a historic figure. Probably, I would rather have preferred to be one of thousands of audience who go to listen to his speech and observe how he is doing, seating in my comfort zone and without any need to purposefully smile or act myself up.

I have had the strong sense of not being able to beat the odds by myself. After going through the silly process of growing up virtually meaninglessly (growing up and going through schools and college in my native country Korea of old days meant preparing to be a good wife and mother), going through some education in this country but ending up being a mom in very inappropriate time (actually there never seemed to be appropriate time to be mom for me), and when I seemed to be somewhat getting out of the stage of being a mom of baby/toddler, having another one to make the older one not to be lonely. In this process, having a husband of old fashioned mind whose concept of being a husband means providing bread and roof over head and virtually living on computer meant I was on my own with living business. Here came the terrible inconvenience of being a foreigner without families in same country and periodically moving to different places.

When my kids grow older and I started seeing beyond family, the first person I noticed was Mr. Obama who was beating his odds to become President of United States, fascinating me. Around this time, I wrote the below article that was posted at “Everyday Citizen” in October 2009. I re-post this old writing in this blog, because it has certain meaning to me.

“I believe that, although in short-term, things may often look messy, but in long-term we will eventually see the true value of Mr. Obama.

Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize: Anything Wrong With It?

Mikyung Lim, Everyday Citizen, October 15, 2009

The news of Nobel Peace Prize awarded to President Obama appears to have come as a surprise and caused fierce criticism, cynicism that the award is premature. This strong resistance to the decision even followed by the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s unprecedented defense of why they believe President Obama is the right choice for the award. To me, the early Friday morning’s announcement of the award brought a brief moment of surprise, followed by “Ah Ha” moment of realizing why the Nobel committee made such a decision. I viewed the decision as an evidence of the sincere wisdom of the Nobel Committee.

When President Obama became the 44th President of United States, I posted a blog on “the meaning of his inauguration” to me on Obama’s website…

“Witnessing the beginning of new chapter of US and world politics and economic landscape in face to paramount challenges from current domestic and global economic downturn and defending US status in world politics and economy in competition with unifying European countries (EU), China, and India.

Witnessing the beginning chapter of sincerely saving the planet earth, our precious habitat, and potentially creating newage human society, lifestyle, and culture over very very long term.

Witnessing the swearing-in of new-kind of political leader / prophet who will truly work on policies on behalf of people, rather than for the sake of interest groups or capital owners, based on facts, sciences, complicate intellects, high-tech methods and skills, and professionalism to do problem-solving of the society and world. He may be able to fix the problems of malfunctioning market system to keep industries and jobs around and prevent future market crashes if he keeps doing his hard work on identifying and solving problems of this country as he has been doing.

Witnessing the beauty of Obama Couple / Family’s love story, their story of achieving their ultimate, highest goal of their lives together.

Witnessing God’s history making of mankind in this country.
Yes, I am a kind of idealist.”

Since then, the exhausting roller coaster of financial and health care reform debates has made my initial fascination faded and made me really tired of all bunch. And the President’s winning of Nobel Peace Prize revived the memory of my fascination and sentimentalism when he gave speeches upon winning the presidential election and inauguration and Prague, Afghanistan Strategy, and Cairo speeches. Despite all criticism, I have no way of objecting to the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s statement of choosing President Obama as the winner of Nobel Peace Prize:

“His extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between people and promotion of nuclear disarmament. … Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future…”

Mark Halperine of Time/CNN listed Five Ways Winning the Nobel Helps/Hurts Obama:

Helps:

1. Validation of his world view.
2. Momentum in current peace talks around the world.
3. Adds to his aura as a historic figure.
4. Allows him to recover from his Olympic failure.
5. Gives him cover to expand the war in Afghanistan.

Hurts:

1. Raises expectations.
2. Emboldens and angers his domestic critics.
3. Will make him the target of late-night comedy jokes.
4. Further divides a polarized America.
5. Will alienate some other (jealous) world leaders, making it harder to work with them.

My reaction to these lists are, “Oh, come on. Let’s set the priority straight on this issue. I don’t see the importance of anything else but the item 2 of “Helps” list: “Momentum in current peace talks around the world.” The rest of the lists seem to be secondary or minor.

In the same context, as a meager effort to steer public opinion, I have commented to several news or blog posts such as Mr. Heilbrunn’s “President Obama’s Noble Nobel Prize” and Mr. Russnow’s “Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Laureate: Whatever Happened to Awarding for Deeds actually Done?” at The Huffington Post; and Mr. Joe Klein’s “No Peace, No Prize” at Time. These news/blogs either criticized the prematurity of the award to Mr. Obama or praised the positive sides of it. Here, I repeat my response to them.

This Noble Peace Prize is the confirmation of what I felt on the date of President Obama’s inauguration. My honest opinion is, his domestic and foreign policies since his inauguration have proved that he is a “Man of Mission.” Three of the Nobel Committee also believed that Pres. Obama has achieved enough to deserve the Prize and the award was not based on future premise. What he has worked on so far have been all about “changing, correcting wrongdoings” that have chronically damaged domestic and world communities.

I believe, instead of focusing on how prestigious the Nobel Prize is, it is wiser to focus on how to use this Prize as a vehicle to serve the world and people better that will greatly boost Pres. Obama’s global agendas. World peace is a work-in-progress without time limit. It’s not like outstanding science discoveries that can be discovered at one time and awarded with Nobel Prize after their success rates being tested by time. President Obama has demonstrated that, at this point of time, he is the “Single” person in the world who can achieve higher progress in international diplomacy and cooperation and disarmament of new clear weapons than anybody else.

He set the strong foundation for this task from the beginning of his presidency. As it has become obvious that Mr. Obama is the “One” in international affair, instead of awarding him when he finishes his task, why not awarding him now, in the middle of his work being progressed.

The timing of “now” will be better than “later” to help him maximize his potential, ability to achieve his global mission.

In the same context, I commented to Mr. Joe Klein’s “No Peace, No Prize” at Time to focus on the positive sides of the winning, if he really cared for the impact of this Award in the world and US.

The priority of this award should be given to the magnitude of progress it can make on world peace talk rather than bickering on whether Pres. Obama has accomplished enough or not. Does Mr. Klein have any other person in his mind who can achieve this global agenda far better than Mr. Obama for now and in near future? Probably not. Criticizing for the goal of criticism, opposing for the goal of opposition without working on solution do not help anything but adding to the problem. I ask Mr. Klein which one of the hypothetical options below he would choose.

• Pres. Obama, with winning Nobel Peace Prize, achieves 85% success rate of his global missions by the end of his term(s).
• Pres. Obama, without winning the award, achieves 50% success of his global missions by the end of his term(s).”

Finally, I want to comment on what I read from a book by Dr. Frank Lawlis. According to him, each person has six faces (natures) that are symbolically named after animals, wolf, eagle, snake, bull, deer, and beaver.

Here, I’d like to talk about a few of them. “Eagle” has the strength of having vision, future perspective and offering direction and guidance, but flawed with the weakness of not doing the details. “Bull” has the strength of focusing on goals and leadership toward objectives, but has the weakness of too narrowly focused and not seeing others.

“Beaver” is talented with the ability of coordinating, planning, group power, and mastery over details, but it lacks of vision and future perspective. It pays too close attention to all details and “now” to see big picture. Each person tends to heavily use one of these five faces, but not all of them, in forming their personality types. Sometimes, I wish to see more of political leaders that dwell on the quality of “Eagle”, rather than that of “Beaver,” especially after witnessing the disappointing rollercoaster of US politics this year.

I believe this “Eagle’s Quality” is what the Nobel Committee saw in President Obama when it bestowed the award to him – as a person, and in his past and future work.

Fixing the Financial Sector and Economist Joseph Stiglitz

Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz has been critical of the US government’s bailout of the banking sector and says that the government should not have bailed out the banking sector but should have used that money to help individuals in troubles. There should be further detailed discussion on this matter.

For now, for simplicity, let’s talk about how to fix the mistakes of the last one year’s efforts of fixing financial system. It’s been just one year, we still have time to fix it. What we need to do are:

(A) Regulate the financial sector; (B) Separate investment banks from commercial banks to prevent Wall Street’s continuous reckless gambling with other people’s money; install the Glass-Steagall Act; (C) Apply anti-trust law to the financial sector as well as health care sector; (D) As Ms. Huffington suggested, individuals move their money from Big Banks to smaller, community banks or credit union to break Big Banks’ monopoly power.

Here is one significant problem in fixing the mistakes/financial system.

(E) Who is going to take care of “special interest politics, lobbyists, and corrupted/bribed Senators” ? Aren’t these the major road-blockers in the process of reforms? Also, we need (F) to install the law to prevent them from working for corporations of conflicting interests after retiring from their public posts, too. We need to make sure that these people don’t get on the way of fixing the mistakes / malfunctioning financial system. Isn’t this the biggest challenge of all?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/19/freefall-excerpt-its-not_n_427509.html

Update:

Oh, some hours before I posted this blog, there was an announcement that the White House is going to propose some  measures to restrict “Big Banks.” According to the report, “President Barack Obama on Thursday is expected to propose new limits on the size and risk taken by the country’s biggest banks, marking the administration’s latest assault on Wall Street in what could mark a return, at least in spirit, to some of the curbs on finance put in place during the Great Depression, according to congressional sources and administration officials.” For this news, refer to:

“Proposal Set to Curb Bank Giants”,

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704320104575015910344117800.html

Obama’s First Year: A Nobel Effort

An interesting, fair assessment of Mr. Obama.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

My Response to Mr. Joe Klein’s “No Peace, No Prize” on President Obama’s Nobel Prize

I re-post my previous comment to Mr. Joe Klein’s blog of October 9, 2009 at TIME Swampland, “No Peace, No Prize” here.

Mr. Klein,

…..I wish you to have focused more on the positive sides of President Obama’s winning of Nobel Peace Prize if you really cared for the impact of this award on the world and US. The priority of this award should be given to the magnitude of progress this award can achieve on world peace talk if the impact of this award can be magnified by any means, instead of bickering about whether Pres. Obama has accomplished enough or not. I also believe that he has set the strong foundation of progress in domestic and global agendas within a very short time span.

Do you have any other person in your mind who can achieve this global agenda better than Mr. Obama at this point of time?

Also, if you have hypothetical options to chose as below, which one would you like to choose?

(a) Pres. Obama, with winning Nobel Peace Prize, achieves 85% success rate of his global missions by the end of his term.

(b) Pres. Obama, without winning the award, achieves 50% success of his global missions by the end of his term.

I posted my more detailed explanation of why I support Pres. Obama’s winning of Nobel Peace Prize at the below blog.

http://www.everydaycitizen.com/2009/10/obamas_nobel_peace_prize_anyth.html

(Read more: http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/10/09/no-peace-no-prize/comment-page-5/#comments#ixzz0W48swsJI)