Sunday, November 9, 2008

Obama and everyone else - I can't keep up

I have a chapter in my book entitled Equality. It mainly focuses on gender equality worldwide, as well as race relations in America. It will come to no shock to anyone that after Tuesday night it needs updating. But what amazing times we live in, in that the past couple years I've been working on the book, I've had to keep updating and updating the chapter - almost too fast for me to keep up. It seems we barely saw the first black Secretary of State before seeing the first female black Secretary of State, too. Then Hilary get within spitting distance of a major party Presidential nomination, the first woman to do so. This is not to mention a large number of countries electing women presidents, often for the first time: Germany, Chile, South Korea, Jamaica, Ireland, Liberia, Argentina, India, and maybe Israel. And then we saw the first African-American actually get the US nomination. And then we saw the first woman get a vice-presidential nomination. And now Obama will be president. It's been pretty amazing watching this constantly-surprising period of oneupsmanship in breaking gender and racial barriers.