Second of three parts
The previous part is at thevoice.us/seeing-the-world-today-though-religious-lens-helpful
Cecilia González-Andrieu writes the following article for the American Magazine on a new metaphor to define our Nation:
“The melting pot is an outdated image of the United States. We need a new metaphor to define the Nation.
“There are those who face the uncertainty with trepidation; so much of who we thought we were was enmeshed inside our well-laid plans. We feel lost, but in the midst of this disorientation we can be patient, knowing that there is something new being born. And there are many spirit-filled persons who find purpose in sharing vulnerability and discovering a side of themselves they had not known previously. These days, I hear from young (and not so young) on how they are experiencing a time of awakening, asking difficult and unavoidable questions, getting to know themselves, and others more fully, discovering strengths and weaknesses, and taking stock.
“We might say that for humanity the coronavirus pandemic is a raging storm. What kind of people will we be, not only at the end of the storm, but throughout the journey?
“Who are we? Although the question is global, it must be answered locally. Who are we as family, neighborhood, state, nation, human race? In the United States, this question is not new. We have been asking it for more than two centuries, but it came to the fore powerfully during the last presidential election and its aftermath. Many of us, especially people of color and immigrants, witnessed the powerful among us setting those they decide worthy, against the excluded, and making evident the chasm between privilege and expendability. We cringed when white nationalism took the microphone and wielded power. In uncovering what had been latent, we have watched in horror as black and brown persons become targets of bullets, beatings, and incarceration wrought by racism and xenophobia, and we ask ourselves, ‘Who are we?’ This question was there before the pandemic, but many of us are now paying attention to it for the first time.
The Fever
“On a recent evening, I recoiled while listening to the news as an irate man wanting to dismantle all public health mandates during the pandemic declared imperiously, ‘If we don’t have individualism, we don’t have America!’ It dawned on me that he is a thermometer, flashing the warning light of a high fever that has been raging for a long time. ‘American’ individualism, containing the other ‘isms’ that allow us to feel superior, promotes the fantasy that it can assert itself against a pandemic ravaging bodies and economies. ‘If I can just have everything for my own comfort and put my interests first, all will be fine,’ we tell ourselves as the sickness spreads. Egoism at full throttle is far from the reign of God. Perhaps it is what most clearly defines its opposite.
“We need a treatment for this sickness tearing into us. On the streets of my neighborhood and stretching throughout the country, there are two strains contaminating us that are working simultaneously on the ‘American’ psyche. The first, individualism, appeals to absolutist ideals of freedom that place individual benefit always ahead of the communal. J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur wrote in his paean to budding Americanism in 1782, ‘the rewards of [the new American’s] industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his labour is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest; can it want a stronger allurement?’ Crèvecoeur was a Frenchman who married an American woman and became a celebrated writer on both continents after publishing Letters From an American Farmer, which included his reflections on life in the United States.
“Crèvecoeur left evidence for posterity of a seemingly total disregard for the original peoples inhabiting the land, as well as their destruction, and his is perhaps the first mention of new arrivals from Europe ‘melting into a new race of men.’ He delineates the requirements for being an ‘American’ with precision: Be European, care single-mindedly about your self-interest and your ‘fat horses,’ and privatize your religious beliefs because these have no application to the ‘welfare of the country.’
“This early treatise argues that the question of who the people of the United States are, despite the language of ‘we the people’ used in the founding document signed only six years earlier, is one of economically motivated self-interest. Today, we witness this in an individualism that fetishizes liberty as one person’s private property and getting ahead of others as a primordial value that bears no responsibility for the common good. Indeed, in Crèvecoeur’s telling, there is no sense of community or joint purpose. The only requirements for being a ‘good neighbor’ are to be prosperous so the neighborhood looks good and to stay out of each other’s way. In a telling sentence, Crèvecoeur identifies ‘religious indifference’ as a much-desired outcome of being transplanted to the North American continent, adding that ‘persecution, religious pride, [and] the love of contradiction are the food of what the world commonly calls religion.’
“Egoism at full throttle is far from the reign of God. Perhaps it is what most clearly defines its opposite.
“If we look for a response to the question ‘Who are we?’ from the time of the imperfect founding of this Nation, the answer should make people of faith supremely uncomfortable. The requirements of caring for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, of sharing with the hungry, the prisoner and the sick, are all silenced in accounts like Crèvecoeur’s. According to him, ‘we are all animated with the spirit of an industry which is unfettered and unrestrained, because each person works for himself.”’
Continued at thevoice.us/introspection-for-national-metaphor-new-definition-2