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Saturday, 5 July 2003
Interdependence Day ::
Tim Bray: On Nations
At the end of the day, I don’t buy it [nationalism]. I think it’s mostly mythology and tribalism and bullshit.
We humans group into social units, ranging from the family, to “tribes” of common interest, to nations, to “families” whose members are bound by shared beliefs that transcend cultural and national boundaries. Loving one’s country is OK, but I read “God Bless America” bumper stickers as including “and to hell with the rest of the world.” The problem is when we make value judgements about the superiority of our culture and nation over other cultures/nations, instead of respecting the differences. In the U.S. we have a value system (at least as best as one could deduce from the actions of our government) that puts free-market economics above all else. With freedom and power comes responsibility, and we seem to favor responsibilities to corporate shareholders above some important things like leaving behind some natural resources and a clean environment for future generations, the conditions under which many of the cheap foreign goods we import are produced... I’ll be typing all night if I get started on this.
Dan Gillmor: My Country, Right and Wrong—quotes the entire Declaration of Independence. Such noble ideals. I wish we lived up to them more.
I thought about what it meant to be an American; I have a friend who will find out next week if she will be permitted to raise her daughter (a U.S. citizen) in this country. I don’t like the way things are going here much, but they’re certainly better than in much of the world. I decided, I can respect and identify with my country’s founding principles ("all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”), but I’m a citizen of this planet first, an American second. Do we recognize the denizens of the rest of the world as having those same rights?
B and I drove to San Francisco this (Friday) evening. Coming up 3rd Street, I saw a billboard, “Blow #$@& up!” (for a gaming web site?) It struck me as a perfect summary of July 4; I remembered my crazy old bandmates in NY, who’d drive down to Pennsylvania to buy a carload of fireworks, including a few quarter sticks of dynamite. The pretty colored ones are nice, but it’s not a full experience without explosions so loud and percussive that you feel them in your gut. We had perfect seats for the SF display, just about as close to the launch boat as one could get. Who needs psychedelics when there are dozens of beautiful bursts of color filling a large portion of the sky?!
So there’s “blow #$@& up,” which is fine for fireworks and tyrannical colonial governments, but as I started to say above, I think we Americans have let our independence, our freedom, go to our heads. We have annoying ways of getting stuck on our rights, our principles. For my part, I’m going to try to care a little less about my independence, and a little more about interdependence.
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