• Sunday, May 15, 2005

    America and the World : Part I

    I am writing these segments on America and the World to give background to our current status in the world to my wife who did not have the opportunity of a university education.

    The United States began as an act of revolution, the first strike for freedom that inspired modern revolutionaries and anti-imperialists everywhere. Yet America even in her rebellion embodied not virulent ideology or anarchism but the evolving nature of Western participatory government and emerging middle class and Christian reform values.

    The outcome of the war was of course the establishment of the first independent states in America. Originally and temporarily governed loosely by the Articles of Confederation, the founding fathers soon came to see that our destiny and security could only be set forth by a federal constitution, with checks and balances between the branches of government as well as between the nation and its states. The result of that deliberation was not only the startling, world-changing reality of a democratic republic for an expanding nation-state (as opposed to the isolated examples in histories of democracies only thriving among city-states and republics faltering when grown to empires).

    It was also the radical ideals of liberty and equality (of opportunity that are both our conservative heritage and yet we can only hope to strive to live up to. But unlike the tempting triune slogan of the French Revolution "liberty, equality, fraternity" calling us to a progressive brotherhood of man, instead (in Dennis Prager's formulation stemming from the 3 phrases which appear on all our coinage) we have an American trinity of Liberty, E Pluribus Unum (out of many, one) and "In God We Trust" which while a more awkward formulation calls us to a commitment to shared freedoms and responsibilities in a union to preserve rights bestowed on mankind by God.

    Certainly inherent in our founding were contradictions that history only worked out by spending its usual currency of blood, sweat and tears. Foremost among them was slavery while declaring all men are created equal. Resolving this one issue "four score and seven years" later would cost nearly a million lives beyond the horrid losses of the "peculiar institution" itself and yet we still deal with its ramifications in our society.

    Secondly, let us examine our early history. Almost self-evident was the manifest destiny of a nation of waves of immigrants forming a national identity while expanding and dominating a continent. One element of that was our treatment of native peoples, the American Indians. But more broadly, it has been the question - who is an American? And what is America? What are our borders? Are we more than a collection of states and territories? What are our duties, our rights to each other? What is our role in the world? Because of our pilgrim and pioneer nature, our basis in political ideas as well as religious values more than a long established people in a land, no other nation faced or faces the same kind of identity issues, though we see similarities to ourselves in ancient and modern Israel.

    The American experience became an example of self-determination and democracy in action. We have never believed in non-interference as a principle but only as a grudging concession to practicalities. Our very existence, even when we lacked size or strength, was an affront to the world. We insulted the "powers that be" and inspired revolutionary values just by being America, growing and experimenting and struggling. We can never be an empire but even before we became a military power we could not help but expand over most of a continent, melding our existence with the land, and pushing out, fighting with, or assimilating its native or former inhabitants. What's more, we also cannot stop seeing ourselves and our system as the world's best hope. Or is it that the rest of the world cannot stop from seeing that in us? When Americans come into contact with the world, either in words or in deeds, we seem to ask "why aren't you more like us?"

    We Americans from the very beginning have been seen as upstart, arrogant, self-righteous, hypocritical bastards. It is a heritage that we cannot escape and can be perversely proud of. Can we be other than what we were meant to be, what past generations hope we would become?