it was really ugly hot today around here…86 at 6:00 pm…
and it is suppose to be hotter tomorrow…
that is my reality today…
given what I have written earlier, how can I find out who I am, given
the parameters of American ideology…how can find out what am I supposed
to do given the values of what it means to be an “American”?
nationalism is suppose to be one of the premier isms/ideologies of our day…
and it has been since the Germans discovered nationalism as one of the means
of a platform for people to exist within…
instead of being Prussian or Bavarian or lower Saxony or perhaps
Catholic as in Bavaria or Protestant in Prussia, you could unite the various
people into being “German”…to discover nationalism in Germany meant
you could unite the people under a banner that didn’t create an US vs THEM…
and given the time period that this was first shown by Fichte, around 1800,
the idea of nationalism has grown in every country because it is a useful tool
to unite people under… another step along the path from one to a family to a tribe
to many to all…a platform to unite people under…
but to my eyes anyway, the call to nationalism has played out…and
one of the reasons is the very deliberate attempt to mark out citizenship
by various means to be very exclusive… only whites are accepted in this
new version of nationalism, blacks and minorities, are not accepted into this
idea of nationalism… but nationalism to be effective, must include everyone,
regardless of race, creed, color, sexual orientation or it is not truly nationalism…
you are part of America unless you are black or a minority or a women or
gay…this attempt to make nationalism very specific and a very limited
attempt to keep America for one group only…
an attempt to create a platform must include everyone…
the Catholic church calls itself catholic because the word
“catholic” means universal…it was for everyone who accepted
the word of Jesus…if you accepted, you were included into
the platform regardless of whatever other identity you might hold…
it didn’t matter to the church if you were a slave or a women or
gay or a Barbarian… that was irrelevant to the main question of
the Catholic church… Do you believe?
where the church began to go wrong was when it decided to
separate out aspects of the church… only men could be priest
and men who weren’t married… by such exclusions, the church lost
it’s universal appeal…universal means everyone… but not if you exclude
some for being a women or men for being married…
once you begin to exclude, you begin to lose your foundation of
a platform…and once again, we see the value of inclusion…
and see the harm in exclusion… intolerance is the opponent of
a universal platform…
a platform that limits like a white only platform cannot succeed because
of its exclusions…the way forward, the path into the future must
be toward a universal, a catholic platform…as we have traveled as
human beings toward a more universal platform for all human beings…
from one to a few to many to all…
and this journey is not only a political and social and
and economic and social, but it is also true of platforms…
Karl Marx wrote about socialism… at first it was a few who were socialist,
then more and more people became socialists…the journey of one, to few,
to many and then to all, still holds true…
Christianty journey is also another journey of one, to few, to many to all…
every single platform we call ism or ideology is an platform which goes from
one to few to many to all…
that is the journey we too must take if we are to become who we are…
we too must follow the path that we have followed as human beings since
the beginning of being human…
the human journey is not an individual one, but a collective one…
and until we understand that, we won’t be able to get anywhere…
but the question revolves around not only our individual path but how we
as individuals, become part of and work with the collective…
we can no longer be indifferent to alienation and discontentment…
because being alienated and discontentment is not only bad for
the individual but it is bad for the society, state, culture and community…
the path forward for us as human beings and as a state, culture, society
and community is inclusion, acceptance of everyone regardless of
what platform they might be part of or believe in…
we cannot reach the next goal of human development until we
begin to hold to inclusion and universality and faith in
all, all human beings… regardless if they hold to our beliefs in
god, state, morality or history…
one family, one tribe, one country, one society, one world…
that is the path of what it means to be human…
Kropotkin