New Year's 2009: Time for renewed hope

New Year's Essay.
Despite the economy, despite our forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the depressing news from the Middle East, despite all this, I’m ready to be hopeful in 2009. I know I might be setting myself up to be disappointed. But I can’t help it. I’m going to will hope, but I’m also going to explain why I think it’s reasonable to be hopeful.

Of course, for Christians, we have theological hope — hope that with God all things are possible and even the bad has purpose. But that’s not where I’m going here. I’m talking about hope right now that life, as we live it, can get better. Certainly, our woes, many of them self-inflicted, like the war of choice in Iraq and an unsupervised economy, offer easy lessons as we go forward. Many appear ready to learn. On another scale, maybe we’ve learned, stripped of cheap money, to look elsewhere for happiness.

Hope is not pie in the sky. It’s built on accomplishments of spirit and we, as a nation, have witnessed a major one in the election of the first African-American president in U.S. history. This should be a hopeful moment for all of us.

In this light I cannot resist sharing some words that have been making their way across the Internet, though their authorship is cloudy: “Rosa sat so Martin could walk, Martin walked so Obama could run, Obama ran so our children can fly!”

The pride of the African-American community in the election of Barack Obama is real, but the pride does not stop there. This is an election we should all celebrate. It represents a advance of the human spirit; it represents a transformational moment in the life of our nation. We can all take delight and in this collective delight our spirits are lifted. Yes, there is reason for hope.

Let us go forward in 2009 and let this new energy and new spirit embolden us and set us on pathways to further our desires of justice and world peace. Let's show the world we are serious that we, as a nation, want to rejoin them as global partners dedicated to addressing the many challenges that face us.

And how do with begin this journey? My hope is that in 2009 we will realize that we need those outside our borders as they need us. My hope is that come to recognize we cannot be good U.S. citizens without first becoming good global citizens.

Our often belligerent and shortsighted nationalism has not served us well. To the contrary, it has anchored us in arrogant military spending policies that have eroded our economy as much as they have eroded our spirits and poisoned our souls. Is it reasonable to hope we have learned this lesson? I think it is. Hope, it is said, springs eternal.

Let's, then, renew our hope as we enter 2009. And to do this effectively we need to go beyond words. Action is required and action successfully directed can only further emboldened hope.

What steps should we take? How do we reclaim our world citizenship? Let me suggest a few ways we can do this.

Let’s lobby our policymakers to rejoin the wider world community by signing and ratifying some woefully languishing international conventions and treaties that have long awaited U.S. cooperation. Among these are the following:

• tThe Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women: Adopted by the United Nations in 1979, this convention has been ratified by 179 countries. The United States is the only industrialized country that has not ratified it.
• tThe Convention on the Rights of the Child: Adopted by the United Nations in 1989, it has been accepted by 193 nations and ratified by every nation except the United States and Somalia.
• tThe Convention on the Prohibition, Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction, including landmines, called the Ottawa Treaty. Besides stopping the production and development of anti-personnel mines, a party to the treaty must destroy all the anti-personnel mines in its possession within four years. As of 2007, it has been signed by 158 countries. Thirty-seven states, including the People’s Republic of China, India, Russia and the United States, have refused to sign.
• tThe Kyoto Protocol, which was negotiated in 1997 and went into effect in 2005, legally binds industrialized countries by 2010 to reduce their collective emissions of six greenhouse gases by 5.2 percent compared to 1990 levels. Over 140 countries have signed the treaty, but the United States, the largest producer of greenhouse gases, has not signed.
• tThe International Criminal Court, which conducts trials of individuals accused of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity when no other recourse for justice is possible, came into being in 2008. The court counts 108 states as members, and 40 other countries have signed but have not yet ratified. In May 2002, the United States said that it would not be bound by its signature and that it had no intention to ratify the statute.
• tThe World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, a treaty adopted by the 56th World Health Assembly in 2003, has been signed by 168 countries. The convention is to provide a framework of national, regional and international tobacco-control measures, including the setting of broad limits on production, sale, distribution, advertisement, taxation and government policies toward tobacco. The United States has worked to modify the treaty, so far unsuccessfully.
• tThe Convention on Cluster Munitions, an international treaty that prohibits the use of cluster bombs, adopted in May 2008 in Dublin, was opened for signature on Dec. 3, 2008 in Oslo, Norway. It will enter into force after it has been ratified by 30 states; as of Dec. 8, four states have ratified it and another 90 have signed but not yet ratified it. The United States has refused to sign the treaty.

After all, one can always hope.

Fox is NCR Editor