January 31, 2009

His Excellency Barack Hussein Obama
President
United States of America
 
Dear Mr. President:
 
Some six months ago at the Saddleback Forum when the topic of abortion was discussed, your Excellency admitted that the question of when human life begins was beyond your pay grade.  It is therefore with fear and trembling that I learned that one of your first acts as the new President was to overturn the executive orders restored by your predecessor barring U.S. government funds from any foreign or domestic agency that promoted or performed abortions.
 
This single unthinking act wiped away any semblance of the benefit of the doubt I willingly invested in you during the campaign: that you were the true maverick and not the impostor like your opponent.  Now I know better: you look like a politician cut from the same wretched cloth.

I expected you to do better.   Anyone whose mind is mired in doubt on such a vital issue as to when life begins would first seek to clear up matters.  You did not.  Instead, you swallowed wholesale the unscientific argument, believed by countless people whose pay grades are much lower than yours, that a fertilized egg of twelve weeks is not human and could be disposed of medically and flushed down the drain.  Or worse, as you recently signed too, an embryo could be experimented on, genetically tested, or played around with as a specimen at the mercy of high pay grade professionals in white lab coats.

These are some of the basic reasons why I and other citizens of the developing world quake with fear.  It is ironic that such a seemingly enlightened politician – who campaigned on a platform of change we could believe in, who enjoyed the triumph of struggle against all the odds that defined him, and who has been an inspiration to many people – signed into law a policy that would eliminate the same opportunity from shaping the minds and hearts of future generations of young people and leaders.

One other thing.  Just the other day, you ranted and raved against the outsized bonuses Wall Street bankers gave themselves for their rotten performance in the past year.  Unfortunately, your Excellency has no moral authority to do that, because by allowing abortions to resume and stem cell research to be conducted without regard for their moral dimensions, you have acted like someone whose pay grade has been raised beyond those of the bankers you so vehemently condemned.

True, every nation gets the government it deserves.  The United States and its President are woven from the same culture, the same woof and warp that led it to its moment of crisis. Mr. President, the greatest problem you and your nation face is not purely financial, and neither is it just economic nor legal.  It’s much deeper than that, and one need not have a high pay grade to realize that your nation’s problem is rooted in moral turpitude.  As the axe of investigative vengeance falls on the Madoffs and Fulds who made off with the billions from fooled investors, not only in America, we hope you and your government learn from the lessons of history that mighty empires are not lost overnight by the actions of a corrupt few.  Every worldly kingdom – Persia, Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Rome, France, Ottoman, Prussia, Spain and England – eventually collapsed because of the moral weakness of its leaders.  If you learn from the lessons of history – and we hope your teachers were at the right pay grade so you learned from them – then America will not join this sorry list of losers. We hope, at the least, that you would not hasten the beginning of the end.

Mr. President Obama, not all is lost.   It’s not yet too late.  We in the Third World chuckle at the kind of democratic politics you have in the West, because there is not much difference between you and us.  We too have low pay grade politicians running our affairs, deciding on matters beyond their pay grade, and making the same stupid mistakes signing into law popular policies on issues they don’t understand.  Like the poor Americans who voted you into office, we too suffer the follies of our rulers.  We bleed when untimely ripped from our mothers’ wombs.  We cry when our hard-earned money is taxed and wasted.

And we tremble, because you have condemned us to suffer the evil that threatens to multiply when economists like your advisers, bankers like those you condemn, and politicians like you who are unthinking decide on matters beyond your pay grade.  We tremble at such inconsistencies, because in your efforts to find and punish the culprits that led to the crisis we face, you will discover that without the moral fiber your nation is sorely lacking, you would collectively point accusing fingers at the less powerful: the immigrants, unborn babies, and millions of workers in the world who are on the receiving end of the collective monumental stupidities which we hoped you would stop.

Though we tremble in fear, we also tremble with hopeful anticipation of your willingness to learn.  You are powerful, not because of your pay grade but because you symbolize change.  You can turn the status quo upside down, injecting a sorely needed moral imagination to your dying nation in a world wallowing in the throes of legislated extinction. You campaigned on an optimistic platform of change, responsibility, accountability, a better life and progress for all. Having gone so far and succeeded against all odds, you more than anyone should know that the best things in life have a moral dimension that go beyond pay grades, titles, and mandates.

Dear Mr. President, you talk of our era as the Age of Responsibility. This is a powerful concept with a deep moral dimension.  One cannot talk of responsibility without consideration of right and wrong, truth and falsehood.  If the Age of Responsibility you speak of would be but a continuation of the shallow, two-dimensional, and hedonistic world your people in the West know so well, then you will fail.  However, if the Age of Responsibility you herald were to remind the world’s people of our common humanity, our shared goals of respect and appreciation for each other’s beliefs and differences and the admission that there lie beyond us realities we may not fully comprehend but that we must respect and cherish, then you truly could be the leader of real change in the world.

You can, Mr. President, symbolize the rebirth of humanity and the dawn of a new age.  You more than anyone else would know what direction a genuine democracy must take for true human freedom to take root and flourish.  You are in the unique position as the ruler of the first democratic superpower the world has ever known to chart the course of world history and bring the present and future generations to a destiny our common ancestors could only dream about.

Follow your heart, enlightened by your mind, and lead us.  You know the right thing to do. Every world crisis results from the lack of good and just people ready to give up their lives to do what is right.  America wants you to lead us to a New World, not the old one where unborn babies don’t have rights, where colored peoples are discriminated against, and where the poor have no one to care for them.  I, and billions of people the world over, trust you to lead us by example through this New Age of Responsibility.  Please don’t waste that trust.

A London Telegraph reporter ventured to say that you are an emperor without clothes, that you are all bluster and pomp, and that when America discovers you to be in the same mold as your predecessors Harding and Jackson, there will be a revolution so great that its threat to the world would not be matched by that which made us tremble during the Cold War years.  We hope he’s wrong, not only for our sake, but more especially for the sake of Michelle, Sasha, and Malia.  They deserve better, and you can make sure they do.
Sincerely yours,
 
Manoling de Leon
Senior Citizen
Republic of the Philippines