The self-evident truth . . .
. . . of one particularly curious myth . . .
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator, with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This lofty egalitarian ideal is the plot line of our national mythology. . .Of course, we know this national folklore has been so often a fairytale. . .The tug of war between the common good and individual rights, often narrowly reserved for white, straight men and systematically denied to others, has been our messy national story. . .We live within what Buddha called Indra’s Net, an interconnected web that at every intersection holds a droplet of water that reflects every other droplet. . . In the end, there is both an irony and a beauty to the communal embrace of interdependence — a realization that our individual freedoms and the collective good are actually one and the same. And perhaps our framers, despite their personal hypocrisies, were wise enough to comprehend this. – Jeff Krasno Jeff's essay “Interdependence Day” is a worthy of an entire read.
America, the whole world, is a contradiction. All seems fragmented, while the separations are illusory in fact. Our solidarity is not a choice, it’s a reality. Philosphers and mystics as far back as Siddhartha and contemporary physicists beginning with Einstein and extending to Neil de Grasse Tyson assert the fact that we’re all connected to each other, to the earth biologically, chemically, and to the rest of the universe atomically. All beings are created equally. That fact compells us to see the other, the human being next to us, or in a Mongolian village, or in a refugee camp in the Ukrain or Russia, as a person with value equal to our own. Our lives are no more valuable and worthy, of no greater or lesser significance, than those of any other human being. No more or less deserving. Our rights are not more important than those of any “other.”
The system says that change can’t come, that gravity wins, that religion is of no use except to placate the people, that you’d better put your trust in growth mutual funds. But there are other Ways. The strength of our illusory tribe is no less dependent than on the creative freedom of the individuals who comprise it. What might that freedom look like? Holly Wren Spauding offers an answer with an individual declaration of freedom:
The freedom to see differently. To be more human.
To question widely held beliefs. To wonder at length.
To create new customs.
To hurry less and less. To take a minute. To lose track of time.
To trust my authority. To resist in small and large ways, every single day.
To fail. To begin again. To flourish without witnesses.
To make it up. To insist. To keep going.
To trust there is another way, to find it or create it.
“The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”