Jeune Street

– A guest blog by Shamim Razavi and Saleem Vaillancourt –

Unless you have a very high resolution screen, the news websites of the world will offer you a simple binary vision: President Obama with his right hand raised, the other resting on history, changing the world. The headline, the photo, and all the story links will stretch across your screen, span to the bottom, fill your mind with its breath-stealing truth and its souvenir-edition prominence.

And then you scroll down.

Markets are crashing, power remains locked and lethal in Zimbabwe, the United Nations secretary general is wallowing in his impotence over Gaza. The world is the same. Now scroll up.

The world is changed. A black man has assumed the highest office in the world, for the first time. He has historical eloquence, a refined sense of the American dream, and millions of people are yearning to be led once again.

Flick down and the world is dark.

Look up, and the world is looking up.

It looks like just another contradiction, another tension that renders the world meaningless. The decline and fall square off against the flourishing rise. But human history is just one story and we always need collapse to bring change. At Obama’s inauguration, the sight of Dick Cheney in a wheelchair was too cosmically ironic to dismiss as chance.

We are here to offer a new voice to our generation: not the optimism of dumb hope but the intent of taking action. If we see the beginning of a new world in the end of the old, we can apply the world’s afflictions to its grandest opportunity. But our vision must be world embracing.

We need resolution.