Nobel Prize winner

Did Obama deserve the nobel prize for peace efforts? It really depends on how you look at it. Has he really done enough yet to garner it? I would say no but I do think that he will in the next three, hopefully seven, years. Some obviously disagreed with me though.

I would have to assume that by giving Obama the prize the prize givers, whoever they are, were saying that by not being Bush, by repealing many of the acts that he had passed, by changing the tenor of the White House's words, by being in support of an ask questions first, and not later, strategy, by simply stepping down off the unreasonably high high-horse upon which the Bush administration had placed the White House and the USA, was enough to earn the nobel peace prize.

That is a powerful statement. It reminds me of when Time magazine made their 'person of the year' the public and put a mirror type thing on their cover. It was a surprising decision and one that a lot of people disagreed with but I loved it. It actually looked at what had happened in the world in the previous year, saw that things had changed, and that the causes of those changes had not been one person but the entire public. In the same light, the nobel prize givers saw that the world has changed in the last year, that many of the changes have been for the better, and that it was the work of one man, because really it is all about the way he carries himself and approaches his work that makes the difference, that had caused that change.

Quite honestly, it was not until a few days ago when someone pointed out that Obama probably won it for simply not being Bush, that I realized how great an impact Obama has had on the world already. No, he has not yet done a lot of the things that he promised but he really is doing an incredible amount of work and almost all of it is going towards returning the USA and the world to the stable ground that it was on before Bush took office.

In the process of writing this piece I have come to realize how brilliant a decision it was to give Obama the prize. I think it's because him receiving the prize made us all step back and think about whether or not he has done enough to earn it. On first look, it seems as though he has not really earned it yet, hell I wrote that at the beginning of this piece, but on second look you see that he really has brought the most peace to the world of any one person in the last year. This is by no means to say that he has come close to fulfilling the promises he made during his campaign or to fulfilling our hopes for what he is capable of but it is to say that he appears to be on the right path towards those goals. Here's to hoping he does enough in the coming years to win it again.