I'm writing this blog for my kids. It's a record of their lives and of my life watching them grow up. And mostly that's it. But from time to time I manage to remember to pass comment on the world around us.
Today is such a day, because today the first black president of the United States was inaugurated. OK, so it's not my country, but it's an historic moment. I was born in a year when the southern US states saw race riots. A time of segregation. A time of deep racial division.
Today Barack Obama became president and it marks out all that is good about the United States. Americans talk a lot about freedom and opportunity. Today America walked the talk.
Regardless of how successful or not he might be in the next four years, the hope of the millions, perhaps billions of people around the world stands as testimony to the human spirit, particularly as the world appears to be tumbling headlong into a financial crisis the likes of which has not been seen in most of our lifetimes.
But today was not one for thoughts of stock markets or banking. Today the world marvelled at what America has done.
And perhaps as remarkable is the fact that although this will be remembered by history as the moment America first elected a black man, for those of us watching today, our main thought was not that America had elected a black man, but simply that America had elected the right man.
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