A new year and a new adminstration loom large on the horizon amongst even larger challenges. There are horrifying images from Gaza and hearstopping financial woes to worry many. In our last holiday post, Max pointed us to the Grinch and I think I felt a little like that green menace when I did my Christmas shopping!
Max suggested we should be asking WHO we are rather than WHAT we should do. If we don’t have the answer to the first question right, it’s unlikely we’ll do well on the second! So, taking him up on his suggestion, the question presented is…
Who are we?
Does who we are make specific demands on what we should do with this new year?
Play according to the rules and don’t shoot opinions at the second question without offering your thoughts on the first one. Here are some creative representations to warm up those creative muscles:
Walt Whitman’s America
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.
“Who are we?” is a difficult question to answer. But it is complicated even further, IMHO, when we consider the question “Who is we?”
Considering current demands for strict immigration reform, persistant racisim & prejudice, I find that defining/describing “Who are we” to be hindered by my struggles to indentify just who exactly “we” is . . . .
My apologies for double posting here, I left my name off my last post & I’m not sure I can go back and edit it.
–Matthew Easley (Montpelier NEH -’09)
I thin that’s an important point, Matthew. I haven’t had a chance yet to read Noah Pickus’s book but I wonder if that’s part of what he challenges us to consider too… who is in and who is out.
Our philosophical rhetoric sounds like a much more open proposition than many of our current political discussions. Stephen Colbert interviewed the incoming representative from Utah who wants to set up deportation camps. Colbert asks, “since when is it a bad idea to round up people you don’t like and contain them in camps.” The rep. didn’t do much but smile. Colbert has a way of getting to the point… a point no one wants to talk about.
Is the idea that there are people in and people out, people we want in and people we want out, contrary to our founding principles? If that isn’t who we are anymore, what is our guiding principle on these questions?
Who are we?
Autoworkers and airline attendants,
Bread bakers and basketball players,
Credit card swipers and Civil War Reenactors:
Ordered madness instructed in the ABCs.
Who are we?
Underdogs
Channel-surfing past Puppy Bowls
Gardeners
Feeling guilty over piles of pulled weeds
Beachcombers
Dreaming of tomorrow’s treasures;
Governors selling Senate seats.
Who are we?
Bullies
Spitting on second systems and foreign languages
Farmers
Neglecting down-river deadzone fertilizers
Golddiggers
Exploiting slave labor;
Judges, volunteers, Constitutional sympathizers.
You and me:
Noblest fast food fry basket flipper
Dishonorable Wall Street slushfund sweeper;
As strong as our weakest link
As weak as fear itself
Me and you:
pOetry cOmpletely withOut punctuatiOn
Crossed t’s and dotted-line transactions
Questions of What do those taxes ever get me?
Asking instead What can you do for your country
Webs full of flies and corners with dead spiders
Mudslinging cave folk and space boy flyers
Classrooms singing songs and children without voices
Manifest fate in a deathlock with so many choices
I.
Look for the stroke that will bring us to an end
Them–
That don’t see us passing Moonriver’s bend
Me,
Sure we can cure this cancerous disease
We:
Who will diffuse the Xs, the Ys, and the Zs.
Edit, Line 5: “Ordered madness forming our ABCs.”
–author
I’m teaching immigration and World War I right now. A crucial aspect of history at this time is the rise in mass media as well as propaganda. I’ve been struck with how many Lady Liberty images there were in WWI propaganda, while WWII images seem to be more masculine. Part of this surely had to do with the cultural foothold the Statue had gained, but I wonder if there’s more…
And does this have anything to do with Tim’s question: What’s the difference between a motherland and a fatherland..?