The Real America

Last week I happened to be passing through Manteo, a small town on Roanoke Island, North Carolina, just as the town's annual Christmas Parade was unfolding. The mistress of ceremonies knew and, with her microphone on high, chatted with each and every parading group as it passed the reviewing stand. On and on they came: the grand marshal, the mayor, the girl scouts, the firemen and rescue squad, the boy scouts, a violin-playing group, a group of little people in hand-made costumes - crepe paper, aluminum foil, the high school band, the middle school trumpet players, floats from  one association after another. On some lawns there were the proudly defiant placards "Put Christ back into Christmas." This was Sarah Palin's "real America." I recognized how foreign that spectacle was to my piece of America. I live in Boston's South End. The only parade we know around here is the annual Gay Pride parade, a parade withs its own brand of unique costumes I suspect would not play well in Manteo. Still, there we have it, another piece of America. In those hours I spent in Manteo I experienced the rich diversity of America, so many different environments in which people can build lives suited to their needs, beliefs, and values. That is what creates our specialness; all of America in its rich diversity is the "real" America.The challenge for any system, whether it's a family, organization, community, or nation is to value and elaborate its differences while recognizing and valuing  commonality. Difference without commonality leads to negativity, mistrust, tension, and, in the extreme, warfare. Religious wars, ethnic wars, slavery and oppression are all based in conditions of difference without commonality. While commonality without difference creates pale, dreary, and impotent systems. There is a creative dynamism to a system that has room for both Manteo and the South End.

Who are these "others?"

The Jesuit & The Skull: Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for Peking Man offers a likely fact along with what is for me an intriguing speculation. The likely fact: millions of years ago, two different  creatures  - with very different levels of consciousness yet from the same genus homo - strode the earth at the same time. Teilhard de Chardin's view of evolution was that, far from being hit or miss, it was heading somewhere, that the species was evolving to ever higher levels of consciousness. When I read the news these days, it is easy to believe that both points are true: that at this moment two similarly appearing creatures are walking the earth today; they look alike yet they have very different levels of consciousness. The soldier shoots a young man heading for the latrine, and as his mother screams over the bloody body. the soldier says to her, "Volia! Here is your gift." The holy man teaches the young that it is all right to murder innocents because through some twist of dementia they are not really innocent. These are the "others" who live among us but are not us. I hope that Teilhard de Chardin's vision was correct and that the time will come when these others with their primitive and murderous level of consciousness will be gone. And I hope it happens before they, in the name of God, take us with them.