Grow up, America!
America has been a wonderful country for most of us, those born white, to live in all our lives.
America, as a country, doesn’t have to get “great again” as our fearful leader would have us believe.
America is really a spoiled brat among nations. We are a very rich nation. We have been an overly aggressive nation. We have been a very successful nation, at least in our own eyes.
We call ourselves the richest and most successful country in the world, but how we got to that point isn’t all that great.
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Our level of “success” has come about at great cost to the many who were overpowered, manipulated and annihilated along the way.
Black people were imported like chattels to be slaves, then sharecroppers, to build the wealth of our southern states. Native Americans were pushed west, killed and forced onto the least desirable reservation tracts as our white ancestors followed the “great” American dream to become landowners and revel in the wealth gained from exploiting the huge natural resources - resources that had been preserved and nurtured for centuries by Native Americans.
If we truthfully reflect on how we got to where we are, we should also realize and recognize that we are also subject to being labeled as a quite flawed nation.
America can legitimately lay claim to great progress in “modernization” of civilization with its invention, ingenuity, industry and work ethic. Electricity, railroad building, the internal combustion engine, motorizing everywhere, building and road construction, medical systems and tech innovation all plug into what many refer to as our greatness.
Other nations, with much less in resources, have learned to live in better harmony and coexistence. They’ve done so with less discriminatory utilization of more limited resources to achieve enhancement and well-being for their total populations.
As we stand, we are much a land of excess for some, yet a land of shortchanging, and even deprivation, of others among us.
We can acknowledge and acclaim our better sides, such as quite good and stable government over 250 years of existence. We can point to a rather long list of freedoms for most of us during those years and now. Most of us are also enjoying a higher standard of living than the multitudes of other lands.
But, now we are at a point where our uneven, and too often cruel, treatment of minority groups among us demands dramatic change - permanent and soon.
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We are also fast reaching the point of waste and pollution, where we either dramatically change our damage to the environment or there won’t be an environment to sustain life for our future generations.
We are reminded daily that we are all God’s children. Do we still need more reminders of God’s clear directives that every human being is equal in his all seeing omnipresence?
Grow up, America.
Can we learn to live together, work together and play together without concern or even consideration of any other person’s size or shape or skin color or ethnicity or disability or whatever else might make them “different?"
Can we learn to love everyone whether or not they are cute and cuddly, or beautiful or alluring, or have great artistry or athleticism, or oratory skill or entertaining qualities?
Hopefully, we as a society can learn to live together in better harmony than we have.
If we don’t, we risk implosion in the not too distant future.
