Letters to Editor

Nobel talk

So President Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Garrison Keillor writes that “the wailing and gnashing of teeth that you hear among Republicans is 68 percent envy and 32 percent sour grapes.”  Keillor’s pungent partisan phraseology smacks of Shakespeare’s last play, Henry VIII, where the King says to Cardinal Wolsey:

 You are not to be taught

That you have many enemies that know not

Why they are so, but, like to village curs,

Bark when their fellows do

To those who say a Nobel is too much too soon in Obama’s young presidency, Nobel Chairman Thorbjoern Jagland singled out Obama’s efforts “to heal the divide between the West and the Muslim world and scale down a Bush-era proposal for an anti-missle shield in Europe. All these things have contributed to – I wouldn’t say a safer world – but a world with less tension.” 

When the Peace Prize is presented to the President in Oslo in December, it would be altogether fitting and appropriate if a massed choir sang the words of hymn writer Lloyd Stone:

This is my song, O God of all the nations,

A song of peace for lands afar and mine.

This is my home, the country where my heart is,

Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;

But other hearts in other lands are beating

With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean

And sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine;

But other lands have sunlight, too, and clover,

And skies are every where as blue as mine.

O hear my song, thou God of all the nations,

A song of peace for their land and for mine.

                               

War or peace? Will history call the men of Norway Pollyanna dreamers or prescient and foresighted? 

Would that this Nobel Peace Prize Award eftsoons will show that the dawn is breaking, and once again the world is in love with America and will pay no worship to the old man of the mountains.

– Don Woodard, Fort Worth