Last updated 11:46, Sunday, 10 February 2008

A COMEDIAN joked last week that America would do anything to get rid of George Bush - and would even go as far as electing a woman or a black man as president.

Did you ever believe you would see the day when we would see a woman and a black man fighting to become presidential candidates?

Just when we start to despair about the world we live in, we are fed another teaspoonful of hope that the planet is going to be a better place one of these days.

I can only just remember the election of John F Kennedy in the early 60s. His claim to fame was that he was Catholic - and the idea of a Catholic being made president was unheard of.

I was going to say ‘how far we’ve come’ but I guess there must still be some prejudice against Catholics in the establishment, since Tony Blair waited until he was no longer Prime Minister to join the Catholic Church.

Mind you, religion, or denomination anyway, may be less of an issue now as one of the Republican candidates is hoping to become the first Mormon president.

I think my generation and the one before me will be more surprised and more gratified than the young ones today.

Of course prejudice exists. We see racism in our country, even among teenagers and children, which is sad.

We don’t have to look far to see religious hatred although, as I have said many times before, it usually has little to do with religion in the end.

But the times they are a-changin’.

I love musicals and my daughter (now in her early 30s) will sometimes watch with me. Sometimes she even enjoys them.

When we watched South Pacific, however, she just didn’t get it. The whole South Pacific story revolves around marrying people from different races and experiences.

Why couldn’t the American lieutenant marry the Polynesian girl? What was the big deal?

Racism still exists but there are also people out there, like my daughter, who have grown up in a world where colour and creed really do not have to matter.

In the decades before, whether you were racist or not, an inter-racial marriage would have caused shockwaves.

While we’re on the subject, I missed Helen Suzman’s birthday towards the end of last year.

This 90-year-old woman may not be a household name in West Cumbria but she was certainly well-known and equally loved and loathed in South Africa.

She was elected as a member of parliament in 1953, and successively with the United Party, the Progressive Party, the Progressive Federal Party and the Democratic Party, served as an MP for 36 years.

What made her so different was not that she was a woman but that she was a white woman who pursued the goals of liberty and equality for all in South Africa.

To the horror of many, she even claimed that the black people were not inferior to the whites, which was a shocking statement in 50s and 60s South Africa.

She was also the only politician ever to actually visit Robin Island, where Nelson Mandela was held prisoner and actively fought apartheid.

She received honorary doctorates from many universities around the world including Oxford, Harvard and her own Witswatersrand.

She was the recipient of the Human Rights Award of the United Nations in 1978; the medallion of Heroism of New York in 1980; the American Liberties Medal in 1984; and the Moses Mendelssohn Award of the Berlin Senate in 1988.

She was a woman but so much more than that. She was an humanitarian who strove for justice for all.

I hope the next president of the most powerful country in the world is not judged as a black or a woman or a Mormon.

I hope it is someone who is judged for what they do and what they believe in, rather than what they are.