I would love to hear a discussion about that.. about Obama,… his wishing to meet Ghandi…. his admiration for ML KIng, and alternatively his embrace of American exceptionalism, the rationale, his ideas of the responsibilities and abilites/inabilities of leadership.

I am glad also that you refer to Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” on another thread.

Although I think passive resistance does not/did not/would not work in many situations (Tibet seems to be one, Myanamar?) or may take way too long and result in equal or more losses and harm done than violent revolution in certain situations, I am convinced that passive resistance will work now ( after so much violent conflict) for Palestinians. And it may work for the Iran’s green revolution.

In response, I have a feeling Gandhi might lay a little Ruskin on the Prez. In Gandhi’s autobiography he talks about the influence of Ruskin’s book “Unto This Last.”

“I believe that I discovered some of my deepest convictions reflected in this great book of Ruskin, and that is why it so captured me and made me transform my life. A poet is one who can call forth the good latent in the human breast. Poets do not influence all alike, for everyone is not evolved in a equal measure. The teaching of Unto This Last I understood to be:

1. That the good of the individual is contained in the good of all.
2. That a lawyer’s work has the same value as the barber’s inasmuch as all have the same right of earning their livehood from their work.
3. That a life of labour, i.e., the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman is the life worth living.

The first of these I knew. The second I had dimly realized. The third had never occured to me. Unto This Last made it as clear as daylight for me that the second and the third were contained in the first. I arose with the dawn, ready to reduce these principles to practice.”

I looked up “Unto This Last” on Wiki:

Ruskin “attacked laissez faire economics because it failed to acknowledge complexities of human desires and motivations. Ruskin believed that jobs should be paid at a fixed rate, so that the best workmen got employed, instead of those that offered to do the job at a lower price:

‘Nay, but I choose my physician and my clergyman, thus indicating my sense of the quality of their work. By all means, also, choose your bricklayer; that is the proper reward of the good workman, to be “chosen.” The natural and right system respecting all labour is, that it should be paid at a fixed rate, but the good workman employed, and the bad workman unemployed. The false, unnatural, and destructive system is when the bad workman is allowed to offer his work at half-price, and either take the place of the good, or force him by his competition to work for an inadequate sum.’ – Ruskin

Ruskin argued that the State should intervene to regulate the economy in the service of such higher values.

So Gandhi might ask Obama on their walk on Wall Street: “Where are the craftsmen in the global economy? Where is the appreciation for their work? And Is there room in your global economy for the supply and demand of higher values?