The Year Ends And Begins A Tapestry of Thought Part 2

 The New Year.

Snow is wet sugar coating the concrete cookie outside.

Inside I’ve been using Youtube to watch more presidential interviews.  After all, this is the year where Americans see if the cronies in the upper echelons rig the elections again. I watched the powerful speech given by Barack Obama about the United States of America entitled one voice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmUUYo9o9eg

I would like Americans to take that to heart. But it seems that too many have become wrapped up in being so proud of where their ancestors came from before they came to America that “America” the country all of us together does not matter so much. It must if this great nation is to flourish.

We must be able to appreciate our rich cultural backgrounds and not take for granted the opportunity to create the nation our children will live in together with hate or love.  We must take the history of the world and wherever our ancestors have come with the good and the bad.

The bad and the good, how do you define those core concepts for yourself? As styles of living, or purely moral choices? It seems that a large majority of Americans are so worried about losing parts of culture they’re forgetting culture is largely the myth invented by those before us to give meaning to the world around us until we’re wise enough to understand why we really do certain things.  There is no one culture in the United States. We have a rich plethora of cultures floating around in a petri dish. There is no superlative metaphor that encompasses who every American is and will be. 

Not every American descends from pilgrims who arrived on the Mayflower, let alone the explorers and tribes who arrived here before that. Americans are not all brave explorers or pioneers on a new frontier, entrepeneurs who build entire towns, or rebels of valor against tyrannical feudal systems, but some of us are, and some of us still carry on this spirit in our lives.

Belief in Manifest Destiny is very alive as can be seen from the deployment of our troops worldwide as well as our economic hold on other countries.

We Americans are not all stuck in wishing for whatever imagined golden age of the past their might have been: Victorian America, Colonial America after the war for independance, Pre Civil War or Antebellum America, The America before the depression the Roaring Twenties, and the America of the 1950s after the two World Wars, America of the 1960s, the Civil Rights and so-called Baby Boomer enlightenment through the seventies, the recessions,  the presidents, the 1980s — or are we all wishing for the decade, the era just before we were adults when we did not have to take responsibility for the world around us? When the political arena was far from us?

What of those of us who have distanced ourselves from our responsibilities, claiming ourselves, cynics, jaded, no part of this world, or that it is not our place to make decisions about the world around us?  That it makes no difference what we do, it ill not change the world.  That we do not want to change the world, that we don’t care about it, that there will always be a place to steal ourselves away.

It is becoming harder to steal oneself completely away from the rest of the world, even if one is determined to do so.

There are technological reasons for this even as there cultural ones and geographical ones.

 Though, even in the cities where people are closest together, it seems people find ways of separating themselves and coming together. Through economic class structure, religion and more. This will be further discussed in the next blog.