The audacity of hope

It’s been an odd week for news. While UK generates more bleak headlines, the USA has been generating a wave of uplifting stories. It’s almost as if the USA has finally burned itself out with recession doom and gloom.

The good news started last Thursday with the miracle of Flight 1549. The story of a US Airways Airbus A320 ditching in New York’s Hudson river filled the airwaves for days. The twin-engine plane lost all power during take-off when it flew into a flock of geese. Quick action by the pilot saw 155 people survived a textbook emergency landing. It was hard not to draw parallels with BA 038, another successful crash landing at Heathrow last year. As a regular traveller it's comforting to know such events are truly survivable.


Good news continued this week with yesterday historic inauguration of America’s first black president. At last I was in a time zone that made it possible to watch an inauguration without rising in the dead of night. It was quite a spectacle. More than one million people had gathered in the National Mall in Washington DC. You could almost feel the palpable mood of hope that swept down the mall as Barack Obama took the presidential oath. I was almost overwhelmed by the magnitude of the events I was witnessing.

As the inauguration unfolded I was reminded of my University days, almost 21 years ago. In 1988 I wrote a top-scoring term paper on Martin Luther King, Jr. I spent months studying the events that transformed him from an unknown local pastor into the nation’s most famous Civil Rights leader.

My term paper concluded with the moment King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech.  This event was witnessed by more than 250,000 civil rights supporters crowding the length of the memorial's reflecting pool. I concluded that this was the moment that ultimately immortalized King for the ages. Yesterday, as Obama stood at the opposite end of the Mall, with the Lincoln Memorial shining in the distance, King's dream was made real. It's life-changing stuff.


Meanwhile, news in London has grown darker by the day. Pick a statistic. They’re all bad. On Monday the Royal Bank of Scotland warned that it would report the largest corporate loss in the nation’s history; a staggering £28billion. The Government increased its ownership of the bank to 70%, leaving the markets convinced that it would be nationalized within weeks. Its shares plunged 68%, dragging down other bank shares in the process.

Yesterday’s news was dominated by a record fall in the value of the pound. It hit a 23-year low against the US dollar. Earlier today the pound briefly dropped to $1.3622. Last summer we were getting more than two dollars for every pound. The Australian dollar saw a similar jump against the pound. Tonight it’s trading at $2.06, down from $2.22 last Thursday.

Today’s headlines were dominated by news that the ranks of the unemployed rose to 1.92 million in the UK between September and November. Not surprisingly, the papers reported that mortgage lending fell 30% in 2008 and inflation fell by a quarter in the final month of the year. Later this week we'll be officially in recession after the quaterly GDP results are published. There doesn’t seem much to celebrate. Britain desperately needs its own dose of hope.