We are citizens of a country that is still the most powerful and the most resourceful, if not the most enlightened. One may also wonder how long, if we do not mend our ways.
With power comes arrogance and with affluence comes complacency and this toxic mix sometimes (not always, and it does not have to be that way) leads to clouding of our judgement, propels its leaders to abuse power and wealth for short term and whimsical gains at the expense of others and to neglect the moral and ethical framework that humanity had build over centuries of hard work and sacrifices. These codes of conduct for moral and ethical frameworks are the real imperatives to seek the truth and to advance justice and are also codified in and sources from scriptures that has been gifted to all major religions of the world and certainly to the Abrahamic faith groups in the most recent human history.
Yet the behavior of our country in the recent past, if not since its beginning, has been a tug of war between good and evil. The pilgrims came to avoid persecution but ended up persecuting and ethnically cleansing the native Americans. We sought freedom from a tyrant king but in his name also established the most atrocious from of slavery the world has ever recorded and worst still, abused religious teachings of Christianity to justify slavery. We helped stop the carnage of World War II and the Holocaust but at the same time dropped an atom bomb that humanity should never have to experience. We entangled ourselves in Vietnam at the behest of France, a practitioner of the worst from of colonial rule, only to carpet bomb one group of Vietnamese and destroy part of a lush tropical country to save another group in the same country. We glamorize our form of democracy but deny the same right to other countries by toppling democratically elected leaders (e.g., Iran in 1954) and supporting autocratic rulers in many parts of the world. We preach peace to the world but also have become the largest supplier of weapons of mass destruction to despotic regimes and rogue forces around the world, either by design or by sheer incompetence and negligence. Though we were never formally part of the European Colonial regimes, other than being part of one of their colonies from which we sought and secured freedom, only to turn around to collude with them to perpetuate colonial legacies and silently become the biggest backer of the last vestige of settler-colonial legacy which is the state of Israel.
How did that happen and why we allowed that to happen is a matter of long-standing debates and will only become more intense in the coming days, if not already. A debate that needs to happen if we are to gain moral clarity on our own behavior, find ways to redress the injustice that we have become part of society and dismantle the very foundation of this suffocating powerlessness of the most powerful country in the world.
How does a small country of 9 million people, itself a settler-colonial construct besiege a free and democratic country of 350 million people where their will becomes our will, their war become our war and their false and biblical claim becomes our false and biblical claim, when many Christians even deny biblicality of the Old Testament? How is that we have delivered more than $300B of support to a country since it inception under the guise of colonial rule by the same country (i.e., Great Britain) from which we had to wrestle our own freedom? How did we stoop so low that we have become a party to a genocide by letting them use our bombs, our machinery, our intelligence? How is that our leaders – both elected and appointed – go out of their way to save and protect their leaders while defaming and smearing our own leaders at home? When and how will this end?
To solve this puzzle, we need not look for enemies outside, as our TV pundits paid to spread the falsehood would lead us to believe but take a deep look inside us. What does American stands for, what enduring values do our history, our struggle and our scripture tell us, what fate do we aspire for ourselves, and do we believe that others have the rights to similar aspirations? Do we believe in human equality or still harbor old colonial, white and European racial superiority? Is truth and justice our shared legacy or misuse and ingratitude of power and wealth will undermine us?
Intense, peaceful and purpose-driven debate is the call of our time, and our future will depend on how we come out of this debate – re-energized to do the right thing and correct our past mistakes or continue to rush headlong with corruptions, paranoia and falsehood and drinking from someone else’s (devil’s) cool-aid. It is time to pay heed to Dr. King who said thus - “There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.” What are those positions, what source do we use to support those positions, and how do we stand firm to restore and establish anew those positions.
This is challenge for the 21st century for us and for the world!
