PEACE RECIPIENTS
I feel it to be most unfortunate that some people chose to express chagrin because former President Jimmy Carter was designated to receive this year's Nobel Peace Prize. To do so, and to make a public show of the act, is an affront to good taste and common sense.
The very nature of the Nobel Peace award, the only one awarded from Norway, has made it one of the most coveted of all and one taking with it much more than the monetary portion of the honor. The Peace Prize is truly international and we , as a nation, should be grateful that the award came to one of our own. To quibble over others who might have been selected can be an embarrassment to Jimmy Carter and an affront to others considered in deciding the awards.
Yes, there are others who merit consideration. Their time may well come. The Nobel prize is not a glittering bauble to be treated casually nor is it awarded, as a rule for a single peaceful action, but an extended aura of benevolent understanding and the gradual building of new, unifying bridges.
We should been encouraged to find that the judges deemed the continued work a former President Jimmy Carter as being worthy of such recognition. We should be appreciate the fact that he did so without fanfare and exhibitionist excess which is noticeable in so many would be nominees.Some other work eagerly, hoping to increase their chances; Jimmy Carter simply lived it. His basic insistence on more attention to “human rights” is indicative of the unchangeable certainty of spirit which guided his steady quest.
It my well the true that the Nobel Peace prize has yet to be awarded to a “most” qualified person. I have an idea that person might well prove to be a woman; someone who has never given a thought to winning such an honor. Is there a young woman somewhere, possibly a mother, who this very day, is nourishing a young man or young woman by example and by teaching, cajoling, urging, demanding and building character in those young minds and bodies fitting them for leadership. They might grow up to rule with greater wisdom and expertize than anyone before them ever has before. Though they rule with the Peace and Purity of angelic hosts, the prize would go, not to either one of them, but to their mentor, mother, and guiding, and guiding force.
There was a pop song lyric years ago which seems to apply. Very
ungrammatically it pointed out :
“It ain't what you do; it's the way that you do it!”
A.L.M. October 31, 2002 [c448ws]
