While 65 million Americans, in the comfort of their homes, tuned in last week to a debate designed to determine the next leader of the nation, a thousand miles away, the man who more perhaps holds America’s fate in his hands than the presidential contenders, lay nested in a cave. Osama bin Laden is clearly the wild card in an election that is centered on war. His being killed or captured before November would make an election victory for America’s commander in chief a fait accompli, while his being alive provides ammunition to challenge the president’s combat credentials.

How could a man who holds no position on par with the presidency have such power? Is this single individual the force of evil incarnate, as the president has portrayed, or is there a substance to the man we cannot comprehend? Is the manner in which he has galvanized and inspired Muslim youth in the Middle East a power phenomenon like that of a Hitler? Or is his being in a solitary and isolated state a modern day version of Fidel Castro’s hiding out in the swamps while plotting revolution, or Ho Chi Min fighting in the jungles of Vietnam , or Nelson Mandella pressing for freedom from a jail cell?

How one person could have such power in the face of such an awesome adversary as the United States is a question every black and minority in America should ask. Because if this one man is able to alter the dynamics of the entire world, then perhaps America’s 60 million minority citizens can find a way to right the racism of this country.

Discrimination in capitalist America has lost its marketability. Put another way, white folks ain’t buying racism these days. There are too many minority rags to riches stories - whether rap artists living large or black CEOs – for America’s 200 million whites to feel that race somehow adversely affects advancement in this country.

Consequently, American society has settled into a quiet acceptance of the inferior economic and social status of the masses of its minority citizens. Individual initiative, rather than group action, is programmed as the path to success, with a premium placed on pursuing things rather than beliefs.

The result is power being measured by possessions - the more one has the more one can influence – and societal status, like being a doctor or lawyer or politician. But neither the man who dwells today in a cave, nor the one who spent 26 years in a South African prison, ever measured their power in this manner. The source of power for men such as them is freedom. Freedom from the material world.

Neither money nor might moves them. Their physical conditions are immaterial because they are called to a greater cause than self - the cause of liberation. With Mandella, it was the liberation of Africa from apartheid; with Castro, the liberation of Cuba from a corrupt dictator; and with Ho Chi Min, the liberation of Southeast Asia from colonialism.

Osama bin Laden has said he seeks the liberation of the Muslim world from American dominance. He is one man, sitting silently in a cave, praying five times a day to a force unseen, believing in the power that delivered to the others the freedom of their nations.