Word: prize
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Maybe the prize will give him more power, new muscle to haul unruly nations in line. But peacemaking is more about ingenuity than inspiration, about reading other nations' selfish interests and cynically, strategically exploiting them for the common good. Will it help if fewer countries come to the table hating us? To a point. But it's a starting point, not an end in itself...
Compare this to Greg Mortenson, nominated for the prize by some members of Congress, whom the bookies gave 20-to-1 odds of winning. Son of a missionary, a former Army medic and mountaineer, he has made it his mission to build schools for girls in places where opium dealers and tribal warlords kill people for trying. His Central Asia Institute has built more than 130 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan - a mission which has, along the way, inspired millions of people to view the protection and education of girls as a key to peace and prosperity and progress...
...wasn't Barack Obama's fault that the Nobel Committee awarded him the Peace Prize, and it needs little imagination - looking at the first reactions to the honor in the U.S., which were hardly positive - to believe that the award was one that he would rather not have been granted. But granted it was, and Obama had to say something about it. Without being showy or dynamic, his brief speech in the White House Rose Garden...
...Almighty. But we do not elect leaders to be monks. We want them to do things. The world leader who actually is a monk, the Dalai Lama, never stops doing things for his Tibetan people and for others; he donated the money that went with his own Peace Prize to Mother Teresa, hunger relief in Africa and a university dedicated to peace in Costa Rica...
That is why Obama's acceptance of the award as a "call to action" was well judged. Let's be honest - as he was: he hasn't earned the Nobel Prize yet. If he does one day live up to the citation in the award, it will be because he was the opposite of humble: because he braved the enmity of some of his supporters by dedicating himself to peace between Israel and Palestine; because he backed his words against nuclear-weapons proliferation with action to stop it; because he reminded Americans, with John Donne, that...