Who Are We?
Every time I sit to write this article, the subject or at least the focus, changes. I am enduring what everyone else is: how to wrap my brain and emotions around what is happening to “our world”. In order to do that, it seems that I have to try to condense it into something manageable, something definable that gets to the heart of it. But it is so overwhelming, encompassing, so total that it’s like trying to hold fire in your hands. It burns, hurts, destroys but also warms, lights and transforms. Fight or flight?
First, what has been destroyed? At this moment of analysis my conclusion is, belief. The forces that fuel this conflagration demand obeisance. They can and are getting it. But for how long does a still vibrant, sensate nation obey without belief?
It has been said that America is an idea not a place. But an idea is just that until it creates itself. The idea did. It became a belief. This is what smolders at our feet now, quickly becoming ashes unless we can rescue the remaining embers as others desperately seek to eradicate all traces.
Why does belief matter? Every cause is based on one. It is what attracts and holds others. Generally speaking, causes are not diverse friendly; after all it likely seeks to gather people devoted to a singular idea and rejects everyone else. What happens then when the raison d’etre is to hold a naturally diverse group together? It follows, does it not, that the plan has to be bigger than any particular interest.
There is diversity in every country, but ours is a repository of them all, our own along with everyone else’s. We have regional, climate, historical, cultural, geographical and economic differences all contained in an enormous area. If it is not connected by a belief, surely a power-based command and control method cannot prevail for long. Our historical character for 300 + years precludes that. Americans cannot be conquered; they must be persuaded.
What vital thread of belief has held us together until now? We were born in resistance, first to religious persecution and in time, to what we came to perceive as tyranny. We started as strangers in a strange land and had to fend for ourselves or die. Community saved us but it was a community based on shared values, work and goals. Perhaps this is where our basic understanding of the worthiness of every link in that chain of survival mattered. It wasn’t just that together we stood, it was that every stance counted. The freedom to contribute produced an incredibly strong, resilient, courageous people that didn’t, couldn’t, take defeat as an answer. Not then and not in 1776. And now?
Self-respect is what is being burned at the stake. In fact, we are being herded into groups that can be celebrated or condemned according to the whim of power brokers. By race, gender, identification, ethnicity, background, history, education, socio-economic status, whatever proves useful in the effort to redefine, or “transform” us and our nation into a command-and-control feudalism. Corporations, education, government, athletics, arts, medicine, our every institution has joined in this campaign.
By allowing our self-respect to be chipped away, bit by bit, day by day, epithet by epithet, accusation by accusation, we have sapped our once proud, ambitious, determined nation of its energy and character. There’s no way we can find or build a better future that has a hope of healing past wounds and correcting terrible errors if we have abandoned ourselves.
We once believed we were endowed by our Creator with life, liberty and the right to pursue happiness. I would add, we are born with the right to self-respect. The first three can be taken away by force, but self-respect must be given away. We have given away far too much already and are at very real risk of losing everything else that depends on it. In a world where identification, an invention, can determine your fate, there’s little reality and meaning. Your self-respect may be all that’s left to you. Grab it and hang on to it.
We are letting ourselves be stripped of our self-respect and if the power mongers succeed, America will fail to uphold the remnants of enlightenment: faith, family, and freedom of one’s soul and intellect, instead giving way from being the world’s beacon of hope to ushering in a new Dark Age. Tragically, Western Thought that birthed the inherent worth of every life and its right to self-respect will die. The lights of reason and hope will go out.