The New American Destiny
What does it mean to be American?
What is our destiny?
Or to be a man, husband, wife, employee, boss, “small business owner”, addict, entrepreneur, convict, murderer, accountant, or the family dog?
This is a pernicious line of questioning.
What separates these thoughts, these political attributes we assign some sort of meaning to, are mainly labels; but the hard truths reveal something in our nature which we can never truly be aware of, outside our full control or awareness…
We are a product of our environment, of all the momentum, that the cauldron of unspoken ties bind us to in culture and in history.
Our time, as we see it now in our particular bites of intuitive and distracted perspective, obsessed with transitory positive representations of realities we’d rather have - forever displaying youth and intoxicating energy - it affects all of us - but especially when we are actually young and vulnerable.
It seems that we keep coming back to similar questions and moments in history, except now we are different people experiencing it.
My grandfather was in World War II during the great fight against fascism, and became what is now known as the silent generation - stoically defending the grande version of our current destiny in worldwide democratic methods and economic growth after capitalism was saved. And they did it while starving through the Great Depression.
Black people rose up in the south and created the Civil Rights Movement, making possible the most recognizable figures in the world today as the ultimate moral arbiter and savior of our modern way of living in equality. It almost seems inevitable that anyone can access any one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches or interviews instantaneously across the world now, and yet much of the movement to a better humanity still somehow died with him anyway. But we still remember it, and what it meant.
Then the Vietnam War came (well there were a few in between, and somehow that Korean War killed even more and never actually ended, though we pretend as if North Korea always was it’s own evil before the concept existed outside of the concept of time and context), and so did hippies and rock music. Protesting with percussive abandon, holding to the beat so undeniably you felt it in your breath - inside your rib cage and expelling what cannot be obtained or truly expressed through the anthems of artists becoming in a new media of aural ubiquity blasted through everyone’s living room and distributed through amplifiers never before conceived on the scale of arenas provided the first worldwide cult mentality of a counterculture consciousness.
After many other wars, many other fights, many other emergences of new technologies, and yet astoundingly more moments experienced in so many ways by all of us still here or were not yet born before…we are inextricably aware. We are linked, whether we like it or not, to all others no matter where or when at this current time in human existence. By that I mean we cannot say we did not know of other civilizations, other problems, other issues, other sufferings. Because we have access to it. We could be there within a few days, no matter where or what is happening in the world. We are all a part of each other’s story more than ever before, and we all feel a little overwhelmed and a little disconnected and very unsure how to navigate anything and everything at once.
But we have to be there for each other. We have to do it by knowing who we are, and allowing ourselves to live as we are, despite our mechanical and extractive industrial economy. We cannot ruin the earth. We cannot smother the most vulnerable among us just because it has happened before and it will happen tomorrow because that’s just how things work in geopolitical happenstance.
We have to remember that we were meant to love each other, to be close to nature, to be able to create in ways that aren’t already dictated to us. We are divine animals, and we are meant for something better. Every one of us may struggle with what that means, but the divine can show up in how you wash the dishes, or even how you borrow something from a neighbor. Some things are more lasting than others, but we’re all a uniquely daring experience.
And we all make choices…
We are alive, we feel, we think - and we know that others do as well.
Even the most destitute & radicalized Palestinian is just as human as I am, and they may even feel the weight of what the human condition truly means extraordinarily more potently than I ever could imagine…more than most of us could imagine in multiple lifetimes. That is because they are experiencing firsthand the consequences of our complex rationalizations, the playground of modern interconnected nation states shifting intercontinental payloads of destruction in keeping a world order - somehow justifying devastating human extermination in a sardonic dance of natural disruption - to prove that death equals salvation. Somehow keeping ties with a country no matter the consequences is better than not bombing children…
It’s as if we never learned anything about what we know is bad for us. Killing never leads to restraint in further killing.
Those we kill. Those we persecute relentlessly in our quest for progress…They are us.
They are what we don’t want to admit as our worst selves, under a different label made as alien as possible so we can’t identify anything familiar. They are what becomes of us when we forget what is important. They are the best and worst we are offering to the cosmic process.
Is this any different to a flower blooming in any particular field in any particular season? Is last winter’s lack of freezing for the first time in 150 years in recorded history better for this flower? Does the flower care about any of this, and should it just be cherished that it exists at all - in beautiful exhuberance while it can in this moment, which is all we really have?
Well - Flowers don’t have nuclear weapons, last time I checked.