President Barack Obama has won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Winning the Nobel Peace Prize is cause for celebration. Anything less than adulation for its recipient sounds more like schoolyard sour grapes. Receiving international praise always resurrects the naysayers and critics.
Just ask Columbus. As we commemorate the great explorer we are reminded that not everyone sees the world the same way.
South Dakota does not even have a Columbus Day. They call October 12th Native American Day. Many school children this week have been putting Columbus on trial for war crimes. Columbus, they say, is guilty of murder, hate-crimes, thievery and even genocide.
Why give Columbus the prize of a national holiday?
Hero worship is not new nor is it reserved for the unblemished. Rather we as a people ever since the beginnings of recorded history have chosen to find those noble few who have inspired us to act greatly. Heroes are not immune to unfortunate outcomes. They are mortal after all. But heroes are those men and women who have seen the world differently and chart out a course of action which change time and space.
Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans inspired generations not the least of which were our Founding Fathers. Carlyle’s On Heroes did the same for others.
Aristotle perhaps described it best when writing about the magnanimous man. Only a few appear to have a greatness of spirit to lead and inspire. Thomas Jefferson in our Declaration of Independence appealed to England’s magnanimity. Finding none we as a people had to break free and create our own great spirit.
Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “A great man represents a great ganglion in the nerves of society.” A great man, the magnanimous man, is a man who provides hope to the hopeless. Such a hero gives us new direction. A magnanimous man finds the new in the old.
The magnanimous man is the winner of the noblest of prizes. He redeems our faith in the possible.
Is this Barack Obama? We can only hope but it certainly was Christopher Columbus.
