WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD: Many years ago I was traveling to Asia from Washington DC\u2019s Dulles International Airport. It was a particularly rough (and busy) patch of my life. I was happily looking forward to several hours of being incommunicado and retreating to myself. Especially considering the engaging weeks ahead of me on this business trip.<\/p>\n
If wishes were horses! No sooner had I stacked up by carry-on bag in the overhead bin, did I hear a familiar voice calling out to me. It was a friend of mine from Singapore. I had not seen him in many years. We exchanged pleasantries and it took the air hostess\u2019 announcement for me to realize my seat was smack right next to him. The odds! And out the small window went my much longed-for nirvana. For the next several hours he regaled me with sod tale after woe of the unlivable place his country had become. How the economy was squeezing business out. How forward thinking folks were migrating in droves, yadda yadda yadda.<\/p>\n
The African (and Ugandan) I am, I was in shock. Singapore in my book represents all that is possible with good leadership. My rose-colored view is mostly informed by Lee Kuan Yew\u2019s transformational story (From Third to First World) that we all yearn for this continent. But I quietly listened as I drew parallels with Uganda. And Kenya.<\/p>\n
With very few exceptions, every where I have traveled in the last 10 years, the locals are terribly unhappy with their leaders, the state of the economy, and are fearful of the future.<\/p>\n
Yes, we live in turbulent times but the FACT remains: We live in the most peaceful era of human history – outside the garden of Eden. Yes, you heard it from me – we do. (Matter of fact, there are more people alive today than have died altogether). Part of our problem is media bias which creates the illusion of a world in decline. And the media can make this brand of optimism appear trivial or even fanciful.<\/p>\n
When Louis Armstrong (pictured, serenading his wife), a man in the November of his life, recorded \u201cWhat A Wonderful Life\u201d in August of 1967 (at the height of the Vietnam War) there was so much anger on the streets in America. Added to Vietnam were the racial tensions that led to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in 1968. The President of ABC-Paramount Records virtually banned the company from putting any effort into promoting this song and in America, it disappeared without trace. Not so in Britain, where it demonstrated that you cannot keep a hot song down as it progressed steadily up the charts, reaching No.1 in the last week of April 1968 and stayed there for a month, selling well over half a million copies in the process. In America, it had not sold even a paltry thousand.<\/p>\n
Armstrong loved the song and performed it everywhere, including numerous television appearances, and its popularity began to grow. At one performance, he reportedly introduced the song with this explanation: \u201cSome of you young folks been saying to me: \u2018Hey, Pops \u2013 what do you mean, what a wonderful world? How about all them wars all over the place, you call them wonderful?\u2019 \u2026how \u2018bout listening to old Pops for a minute? Seems to me it ain\u2019t the world that\u2019s so bad but what we\u2019re doing to it, and all I\u2019m saying is: See what a wonderful world it would be if only we\u2019d give it a chance. Love, baby, love. That\u2019s the secret\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
Armstrong\u2019s very poignant, gravelly-voiced version of this jazz classic – brimming with his ebullient character and optimism has also been used variously in at least 50 Television shows and films. In 1999, it was inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame.<\/p>\n
So for my #<\/span>Sunday<\/span><\/span><\/a> thought: In place of \u201cThis World Is Not My Home,\u201d how \u2018bout we sang, \u201cWhat A wonderful World\u201d? We do not need utopia to believe that it is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD: Many years ago I was traveling to Asia from Washington DC\u2019s Dulles International Airport. It was a particularly rough (and busy) patch of my life. I was happily looking forward to several hours of being incommunicado… Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":840,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacob.zikusooka.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacob.zikusooka.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacob.zikusooka.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacob.zikusooka.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacob.zikusooka.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=839"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jacob.zikusooka.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":841,"href":"https:\/\/jacob.zikusooka.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839\/revisions\/841"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacob.zikusooka.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jacob.zikusooka.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacob.zikusooka.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jacob.zikusooka.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}