AMERICA, THE (NOT SO) BEAUTIFUL

I was born and bred right here in these United States of America! I have never been proud to be an American.  I have never been proud to be black.  I have never been proud to be gay.  I have always felt you cannot take pride in something you did not have a hand in directly creating.  All these things, being American, black and gay were circumstances or positions I was born into not circumstances or positions I chose.  Though I cannot say I am proud to be an American for the reasons cited above I do love my country.  Though I am not a patriot I do believe in the august destiny of America, no matter how hard the conservative or liberal elements try to distort that destiny.  It is the destiny of the United States, I believe to be a light unto the world, to show the world that "out of many, one" may emerge.  A decided New Age principle, the destiny of the group is the destiny of the world.  Not just any group, but a group made up of individual units which are educated, principled and full of integrity.  Only such a group with such individuals may lead. 

America is full of individual units, or ethnicities. Too often when these units come to America, though, they assimilate and extinguish their ethnic flames in pursuit of some "American" ideal.   This ideal would have them imitate the White Anglo Saxon Protestant lifestyle in demeanor, dress and speech. Such ideals are illustrated in Ralph Lauren or Abercrombie and Fitch advertisement campaigns.  These campaigns rarely feature persons of color and thereby allude to an environment where minorities do not breath the same rarefied air or habit the same upper echelons of American society.  This vision of America, one that is white-washed, one where one has to look intently and widely to find pigment that contains color, is a direct and consumate result of America's long standing affair with racism and prejudice.  This is the first quality that makes America not so beautiful.

Not so beautiful and antagonistic to the unfolding pageant that is America is also the fervent and intense struggle between labor and capital.  One of the most prominent reasons people dared cross the Atlantic from Great Britain to reach the New World was to free themselves from the monarchy, to find a place where freedoms could be gained that had been suspended or ransomed under a monarch.  It was an opportunity to start over.  As soon as the revolutionary war was upon the fledgling colonies they began forming ideas about what a New World would look like, one without a monarch but a representative form of government predicated upon the Ancient Greek philosophy of democracy.  This form of government would see every man with a voice in goverment and the ability to influence the direction of that government. As august as the priciples were that are enshrined in our national documents an even more formidable and contrary spirit arose in the form of the enslavement of Africans in America.  The institution of  slavery provided America with its first real taste of wealth and the power that accompanies such wealth.  To be sure there were wealthy merchants and traders here and there but the institution of slavery made it possible for wealth to spread on a widespread scale.

In a sense, the institution of slavery provided the first look at the struggle between  labor and capital in America.  Though slaves were not considered human under the same statutes as whites, they became a slave class, a class lower even than a feudal system for they had not hope of salvation or redemption.  The great slave estates of the South eventually gave way to the railroad, coal and steel barons where untold and pronounced wealth began to create a staggering difference between labor and capital.  This in turn gave birth to the Labor Movement, a sort of equalizing force between labor and capital.  Labor and capital have been intensely arrayed the one against the other for decades with labor losing significant ground and capital towering about the American landscape as the new robber barons of finance emerged on the American landscape.   Allied with government capital has been able to free itself from cumbersome regulation and virtually dictates to government what it will tolerate.  As capital appears and disappears on the American scene, it creates and destroys economies on a whim.  With a simple keystroke a middle class economy can evaporate when capital decides to take its treasures and wares to a different location, one more amenable to its demands.  The struggle between labor and capital simply intensifies class warfare.  The pursuit of wealth and capital has subordinated all resources, including human, to accomplish its ends.  This has taken a significant and defining chunk out of the beauty of America.

Any country can be defined or described by its social, economic and political systems. These will illustrate the status and direction of the country.  The two major ills listed above that I believe affect the Beauty that could be America are social (racism and prejudice) and economic (labor and capital).  Equally as important in this country is the political system.  As alluded to earlier it was based upon the august principle of democracy eludicated in Greek society.  But the system seems to have been doomed to failure from the start.   I believe Alexander Hamilton himself said that  a certain segment of the people are not fit to rule or require instruction as to how to rule.  As imperintent a statement I believe this is he was right.  Men cannot comprehend the virtues of freedom without education.  It is education that illustrates to man that he has choice and is able build discrimination into his character by virtue of choice (discrimination between that which is good for him and that which is not good for him). Without education man cannot hope to be free.  Without education what he deems freedom is but mere license, the idea that he can do what he wants, when he wants, with whomever he wants.  Without an educated society you cannot truly have a free society.

Politics in America has been a sordid game of, "you scratch my back and I'll scatch yours";  we have a capitalist state masquerading as a pretend system of democratic government. The rights and the will of the people are sacrificed to the will of the corporation which can influence the creation and destruction of laws affecting their well-being.    The collapse of the financial systems currently crippling the international economies have not only economic roots but political roots as well.  The Occupy Wall Street protests are predicated upon the destruction of the natural order of politics and its manipulation by the corporate interests.  This political manipulation of the system, too, distort the beauty of America.

Though the anthem, America, The Beautiful refers primarily to physical characterstic of the American landscrape it also alludes to metaphysical characterstics like brotherhood, which have yet to to reach fruition on these shores.  I do not believe you can discuss life without discussing the political, economic and social strata that make up a society.  This triumverate lords over American society. In its current state it is distorted and perverse and thus affects the beauty that this nation could display.  America can be beautiful, America should be beautiful.  But until man rids himself of his lower qualities like greed, ambition and unwholesome desire, he does not reflect beauty but ugliness.  Right now America is ugly, not beauty.  Though I admire President Obama's desire to change the face of Washington, D.C., I cannot help see his desire and vision and naive and foolish.  The problems in Washington, D.C.,  are grossly systemic and need to be brought down at the root.  The system works for too many people.  Only a catastrophic demise will bring it down.  Until such time comes, we can only work for the beauty we believe in and by our own efforts try to effect change to bring about the true beauty of America.  There are many doing this.  The Occupy Wall Street protests are but one avenue.  But we must value beauty over ugliness.  For now, I fear America may prize its ugliness over the beauty that may be.  May it not always be so.