VirusHead

Here’s a video that gives a pretty good idea of how America is currently viewed in much of the world. It may have an unfamiliar flavor to an American audience, but it’s worth watching the whole song. The imagery is striking.

(Thanks to JR)

Don’t miss an American video response.

We are wall-eyed, our vision mis-aligned. We construct walls and eye them, while simultaneously looking away. My eyes hurt just thinking about it. We’ve lost our depth perception.

It’s a pathetic, futile thing (and a profound forgetting of history) to engage in wall building. But it’s something to do, and there are hatreds to be stoked, fears to be placated, monies to be gathered.

Shakespeare used the term “wall-eyed” to express reproach, metaphorically extending the literal misalignment of the eye’s vision in order to criticize interpretive vision. A “wall-eyed” wretch has more than distorted literal vision. The implication is that he (or she) is out of alignment with social reality, totally lacking in empathy, knowing no pity – unnatural, alienated, and irretrievably perverted.

I just think of the meaningless, baleful sort of gaze of the fish – the walleye. Nobody home. In denial of reality, in paranoia and fear, in ethnocentrism and narcissism and xenophobia, and in misaligned vision – we construct more walls. Mine! Mine! Here us, there all of you things. Disney nightmares notwithstanding, it is a small world after all – we’re stuck with each other. It’s just not going to work.

Stricter border controls and higher penalties will not stop illegal immigration either. They don’t address the root causes of the problem: a stagnant Mexican economy and strong demand for cheap labor in the U.S. market.

Building a wall may mean safety for some but tragedy for many. I got my indoctrination into the horror of mortar and concrete on August 13, 1961, watching East German communist police close off East Berlin, first with barbed wire, then with concrete. On the West Berlin side, people came up to the wall in tears as families were divided and East Berliners were cut off from their jobs in the West.

…This memory comes back to me because we seem to be afflicted with another spell of “wallitis” – hoping that closing off problems will solve them.

American soldiers have been engaged in a project of closing off the Sunni district of Adhamiya in Baghdad. Israel has been working for years on a 436-mile fence that, in part, closes off the Arab section of East Jerusalem. Pakistan is building a fence to close off Taliban routes into Afghanistan. And, lest the United States miss out on the closing-off festival, it has started work on what will eventually be a 700-mile fence along the Mexican border.

Proponents of that wall speak of keeping out terrorists as well as job-seeking illegal immigrants. That is hard to establish. But what can be established is that the projected fence has helped to stimulate a booming business in tunnel building and another booming business in forging identity documents.*

As Robert Frost wrote, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” – From Daniel Schorr, “Closing off problems with walls doesn’t solve them,” Christian Science Monitor, Friday May 25, 2007

*Not to mention a booming business…. in building walls.

Almost all of us are immigrants. We are the children of immigrants and exiles.
Inscribed on a table within the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
- “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus

If that’s over, how about the global community? Or should we only realize our common humanity when we are threated by global extinction (more nukes, more toxins, kill everything – yar).

Work on smarter solutions now. It’s a simple demographic. A shortage of skilled workers approacheth.

Wall-building is so contagious, but it doesn’t really work in microcosm either. The walled complex, the walled community.

We’re disrupting the rhythms of human life and interaction to our disgrace – and peril.

Less interaction, less understanding = more hostility, fake security.

You build the walls, and then you need the guards, and the passwords. And you live behind the wall, or you’re kept out by the wall. You hire bodyguards if you’re rich enough. You hide your children.

Who is the greater hostage of the bunker/fortress/rabbit hole/prison mentality? The gated community (even when you’ve seized a natural resource for colonization), is still a prison. You’re locked inside just as surely.

(Note to self: Objects – intended uses not limit/closer than they appear, panoptican, circulation/exchange, lines of flight, sca-venge.)

That’s how I like to see it – religion flanked on either side by freedom and liberty. Liberty of religious belief and expression, freedom of religion from government intervention and freedom of government from religious intervention. Freedom of thought, freedom of mind, freedom of belief.

When I was a kid, it was very common for us to say, “It’s a free country. You can’t tell me what to do.” We used it in a wide range of situations, some of which didn’t exactly work out.

It turns out that mom and dad and other family members, your teachers and other secular authorities, the religious authorities of your family’s membership, and the mean bully kids all can actually tell you what to do, even in a free country.

One of the benefits of growing up was getting to decide who I was going to allow to be in a position to tell me what to do. Myself, I prefer a light touch and lots of autonomy, but others need to be regulated from the outside to feel secure. Choosing our authority-figures wisely is a developmental task for every one of us.

The separation of church and state, the resolute decision to keep the two separate – for the benefit of both sides as well as for the rights of each and every American citizen – is one of the most significant of our national contributions to the world.

It is also one of the most important aspects of the American heritage that we hold in common – beyond our differences.

America is about freedom, America is the land of free. Free thought, free expression, free belief (or unbelief!).

Have we so forgotten that? Let’s not throw it all away.

Do not be misled. Religious movements of all kinds thrive in America precisely because of this set of traditions, and our advances in science and technology depend on them too.

Here is a little collection of quotations on this set of topics – I find these resonant today. Comment if there are more you’d like to add.

“Intellectual freedom is essential to human society. Freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorships.” – Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, Russian nuclear scientist.

“Protecting religious freedoms may be more important in the late twentieth century than it was when the Bill of Rights was ratified. We live in a pluralistic society, with people of widely divergent religious backgrounds or with none at all. Government cannot endorse beliefs of one group without sending a clear message to non-adherents that they are outsiders.” – Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, in a speech to a Philadelphia conference on religion in public life, May 1991

“Religious beliefs and religious expression are too precious to be either proscribed or prescribed by the state.” – Justice Anthony M. Kennedy

“Voluntary, individual, silent prayer has never been banned or discouraged in the public schools. The Supreme Court has banned state-sponsored religious services. Those who advocate prayer services in the public schools do not want voluntary prayer. They want the government to be officially involved in promoting and sponsoring prayer services so as to put pressure on children to engage in public prayer. They apparently do not care whether parents want their children to engage in public prayer or be indoctrinated with sectarian religious ideas. The object is to provide a captive classroom audience that will be exposed to the prayers of those with a religious message, which they deliver in the form of a prayer.” – John M. Swomley, Religious Liberty and the Secular State: The Constitutional Context, 1987, p. 128.

“One of the embarrassing problems for the early nineteenth-century champions of the Christian faith was that not one of the first six Presidents of the United States was an orthodox Christian.” – Mortimer Adler, The Annals of America: Great Issues in American Life, Vol. II, 1968, p. 420.

“We will be a better country when each religious group can trust its members to obey the dictates of their own religious faith without assistance from the legal structure of the country.” – Margaret Mead, anthropologist, Redbook magazine, February, 1963

“It is implicit in the history and character of American public education that the public schools serve a uniquely public function: the training of American citizens in an atmosphere free of parochial, divisive, or separatist influence of any sort – an atmosphere in which children may assimilate a heritage common to all American groups and religions. This is a heritage neither theistic nor atheistic, but simply civic and patriotic.” – Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, Abington Township S.D. v. Schempp, 1963

“The separation of church and state is extremely important to any of us who holds to the original traditions of our nation. To change these traditions by changing our traditional attitude toward public education would be harmful to our whole attitude of tolerance in the religious area. If we look at situations which have arisen in the past in Europe and other world areas, I think we will see the reasons why it is wise to hold to our early traditions.” – Eleanor Roosevelt, New York World-Telegram, June 23, 1949

“Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.” – William Butler Yeats, 1937

“You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man’s freedom. You can only be free if I am free.” – Clarence S. Darrow, 1857-1938, American attorney.

“I do not believe that any type of religion should ever be introduced into the public schools of the United States.” – Thomas Alva Edison

“The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.” – John E. E. Dalberg (Lord Acton, British historian), The History of Freedom and Other Essays, 1907

“In all ages, hypocrites, called priests, have put crowns upon the heads of thieves, called kings.” – Robert G. Ingersoll, Prose Poems and Selections, 1884.

“A civil ruler dabbling in religion is as reprehensible as a clergyman dabbling in politics. Both render themselves odious as well as ridiculous.” – James Cardinal Gibbons, 1834-1921, second American to be made a Catholic cardinal, Faith of Our Fathers, 1877.

“The structure of our government has, for the preservation of civil liberty, rescued the temporal institutions from religious interference. On the other hand, it has secured religious liberty from the invasion of the civil authority.” – U.S. Supreme Court, 1872

“… I questioned the faithful of all communions; I particularly sought the society of clergymen, who are the depositories of the various creeds and have a personal interest in their survival … all thought the main reason for the quiet sway of religion over their country was the complete separation of church and state. I have no hesitation in stating that throughout my stay in America I met nobody, lay or cleric, who did not agree about that.” – Alexis de Tocqueville, writing of his travels in America in 1830

“All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate which would be oppression.” – Thomas Jefferson, “First Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1801

“Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and Dogmatism cannot confine it.” – John Adams, letter to John Quincy Adams, November 13, 1816.

The stated purpose of the American government: “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” – Preamble to the Constitution, 1787

“Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.” – Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782

“Religious matters are to be separated from the jurisdiction of the state not because they are beneath the interests of the state, but, quite to the contrary, because they are too high and holy and thus are beyond the competence of the state.” – Isaac Backus, Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty, 1773.

“I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other.” – John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, 1689

“Enforced uniformity confounds civil and religious liberty and denies the principles of Christianity and civility. No man shall be required to worship or maintain a worship against his will.” – Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenet of Persecution, 1644

“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” – John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644

“It is a heretic that makes the fire, not she which burns in it.” – William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, Act 2, Scene 3

“And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father, which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.” Matthew 6:5-6.

Compassion. Peace. Love. Liberty. Freedom.

In the words of an English teacher at Wellesley College…

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

Oh beautiful, for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
‘Til all success be nobleness
And ev’ry gain divine!

Oh beautiful, for patriot’s dream
That sees beyond the years!
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!

For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.
~Dorothy Thompson

Our defense is in the spirit which prized liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doors.
~Abraham Lincoln

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
~William Faulkner

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
~Abraham Lincoln

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself.
~Thomas Paine

Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshed – else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die.
~Dwight D. Eisenhower

There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.
~William J. Clinton

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
~Simone de Beauvoir

Where liberty dwells, there is my country.
~Benjamin Franklin