The AP's Top Ten News Stories of 2007 [post below] are all important, of course, but they are mostly dread-full. (Though their subheadings could be hopeful. "Global warming" includes the Nobel Peace Prize going to Al Gore, for instance, as recognition of what the Onion calls his weather slide show.)
Here's the beginning of my list of hope-full news stories.
Help me think of some others!
January 4, 2007. The first Muslim member of Congress, Keith Ellison (D-Minn), takes the oath of office on Thomas Jefferson's copy of the Quran.
February: The Lives Of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), with its message that people, even Stasi agents, can change for the better, wins the Academy Award for best foreign language film.
July: Libyan leader Qadhafi frees the Bulgarian and Palestinian medical personnel unjustly imprisoned for eight years.
Paris, France, introduces the first of 20,000+ low-cost rental bikes available at hundreds of sites around the city, to promote a cleaner, healthier place.
Doris Lessing wins the Nobel Prize in Literature 2007.
From her acceptance speech, at
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/lessing-lecture_en.html
The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise ... but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill.
It is our stories, the storyteller, that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, what we are at our best, when we are our most creative.
December: New Jersey abolishes the death penalty, the first state in 40 years to do so.
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