Obama's win will usher in a brave new world

• If the Senator wins on Tuesday, the world will never be the same

THIS WEEK, NOT ONLY WILL the world as we know it change forever, it will turn upside down.

If all goes well (and there is no Kenya-style rigging in the elections), America will have voted in Barack Obama, the only hope the US and the world has for creating a more just and compassionate social order.

A seismic paradigm shift will occur. Greed will no longer be considered a legitimate and desirable aspiration, as it currently is in the US and elsewhere.

Equity and social justice will be hallmarks of civilised societies, not wealth concentration and individualism.

America and the world will finally move towards creating more humane societies where the rich do not hog all the resources and opportunities at the expense of the not-so-rich.

Western nations, reeling from the excesses of capitalism, will rethink their anti-protectionism and anti-nationalisation strategies — a move that would have been considered unthinkable just a few weeks ago.

What is more, countries that pushed privatisation, liberalisation and globalisation down the throats of poor countries will have to eat their words.

Unfettered capitalism and unregulated free markets will be a thing of the past, thanks to lessons learnt from collapsing institutions on Wall Street. (Already, Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has admitted that he made a big mistake in thinking that free markets would regulate themselves.)

In other words, the United States will begin to wean itself away from the “dictatorship of money”.

This trend will herald the birth of a brave new world, where governments around the world will strive to level the playing field for all income groups so that wealth and opportunities are accessible to all.

Obama has promised to “spread the wealth around” in the US by using taxpayers’ money towards programmes that assist low-income groups and the middle classes. John McCain and his Republican lieutenants call this socialism.

Obama has been labelled a Marxist who wants to “take from the rich to give to the poor” (as if this is a sin!).

These are the same people who claim to be devout Christians, forgetting that one of the basic tenets of Christianity is to show kindness towards the less fortunate.

The idea that the rich should subsidise the poor is so abhorrent to the Republicans that they have convinced a large section of American society to believe that Obama is trying to introduce Cuban-style communism into America.

They fail to understand that what Obama wants for his country is neither charity nor communism. All he wants is to create a more just society where people who are too weak, too poor, too marginalised or too disempowered to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps have a chance at making it in life.