National Identity

I was reading something from Thich Nhat Hanh awhile ago, and made a note of his litmus test for "right speech": Ask "Is it true?" and then "Is it useful?" If both of these conditions are met, then I can generally be pretty comfortable saying it. If I don't know something to be true then I need to look at it some more. I mention this because I've been troubled for some time by a sense that those who would lead us seem to favor trying to scare us witless, and then offering some draconian "solution" that we'd have to be witless to adopt. The MSM seem to be complicit in that, perhaps because it's good for ratings for their "news" programs.

Who are we and what do we stand for? We are being led as Americans, so what does that mean? We have dispossessed and displaced all of the initial inhabitants of our land so that claim is entirely based on force majeure. I see that as a significant part of our difficulty in relating to the world: we have no cohesive sense of history and little if any national credibility. Edmund Burke wrote: "People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to our ancestors." We didn't come here together, and we don't seem to have done a very good job of coming together since then.

We don't have a discernable shared vision of our common goals. Until we seriously address that, I believe it's going to be increasingly difficult to remain competitive in what is already a global economy. We can only cloak ourselves in our faded glory for so long, and then we'll have to show something. The Greeks have been Greek for millennia, and the Romans Roman and the French French. Even the British have been British since 1066. We've been jockeying for advantage among ourselves for a few hundred years.

Do we believe that all men are created equal? Do we believe "You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself"? We seem to see people from communities other than "our own" as different somehow and we seem to use "globalism" as a pejorative. When and how did we become so different from one another? Who benefits from us becoming different and perpetuating our differences?

We are less than 5% of the world population and we need to figure out together who we are and who we want to be pretty soon. We're burning daylight and the other 95% may just decide to move ahead without us. They could, you know.