An Open Letter to Barack Obama

I thought I'd try to catch you now, before you reached the Presidency, where you are probably not going to have time to read letters like mine.

I was two years old when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, but strangely enough, I fancy that I can remember the hope and promise that lingered a while even after his death. I saw your speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, at Nashua, New Hampshire, and the one in Berlin. People say you are like him, and I agree. Perhaps clever, erudite men have written your speeches, but you have delivered them, and delivered them well. And somewhere, embedded in the words, lay a promise of a future where America rediscovers and reclaims the values born of its inception.

When did greed become good, Mr. Obama? When did labour lose its intrinsic dignity? When did what we own come to define who we are? When did adventures abroad matter more than our children's education or the health of our people? When did we give ourselves permission to use force to democratize the world? When did it become acceptable for us to send the least affluent of our young men and women to foreign wars, to fight for imperial power? When did "supporting the troops" become the signing of a cheque and the sporting of a bumper sticker? When did more and more and more become the only thing we cared about?

What has happened to us, Mr. Obama?

We need to change and someone has to demand that we do. That person won't be popular; we have grown addicted to our material existence and will not take kindly to being told that enough is enough. But someone has to say it, Mr. Obama. Someone has to demand that we find our nobility again, our humanity, our honesty. We need to learn how to be proud of who we are instead of what we own.

Perhaps then we won't feel the need to spread democracy at the barrel of a gun, because we will simply become an example worth emulating.

Do you think you can possibly help with all that? I know you can't do everything you hoped to do, or keep all the election promises you have made. No one can - no one does. But perhaps if you could just remind us of our better natures, of what we could be, it might help.

Regards,

M. Morris.