What happens when you are raised a military brat, steeped in patriotism, have served in the military yourself, but have seen both the promise and the pain of the American Dream firsthand?
How are you supposed to feel about your country when you live overseas on an American reservation at the age of 9 and are called nigger – for the first of many times in your life – by another, adult American, the father of your best friend?
And what does it mean to have grown up on numerous military reservations, the closest this nation has come to fulfilling the American Dream for its diverse population, and then spend the rest of your life out in the real world, where expressions of overt racism are not accompanied by demotion and a stiff fine, but where covert racism also ends careers?
I’ll tell you. It makes you feel split. Right in half. Attempting to grasp hold of water that slips right through your fingers. Nationalism is strange that way. Something ephemeral, simultaneously real and unreal, an affectation of the mind; a dream – or nightmare – collectively held and subjectively experienced, dependent upon one’s nearness or distance from the societal mean.
Everybody has a story. An experience. Every person, family, group. Pain, heartache, love and joy comprise the essence of life, no matter where on this planet you are born. But all born to this land – the Great Experiment, something never enacted before on the face of this earth – experience these things in the crucible of the world’s karmic tender, born to pay and get paid with the terrors and blessings of countless millennia, played out on the biggest stage, for a multiversal audience.
We can each only truly speak from the subjective when talking about such things. But one thing is certain. Whether we are from Great Britain, Nigeria, France, Venezuela or anywhere else, we carry the collective weight of that nation’s karmic burden within us each, until we reach a place and space in our lives when we do not, and the genetic cellular database has been cleared and we can move on to higher versions of our shared reality.
Become Citizens of the World, beholden to humanity, rather than clan and country. Or, natural and soverign residents of the land, this earth, answerable to no government or onerous law. But many cannot conceive of such and that is, perhaps, as it currently should be.
Freedom has a heavy price. Autonomy, a release from burdens many believe to be delights. When the rights of members of smaller groups require protection from the majority, it is difficult to know when those protections – and governmental oversight – are no longer needed.
The Ancestors often demand acknowledgement, clamoring in the body and mind for surcease in the forms of retribution or atrocity. Depending upon whether we are more closely aligned with that negative or positive stream of genetic information determines the integrity or restlessness of our thought processes and decision-making matrices. From the individual to the collective, these underlying and subconscious imperatives are present within us all, and yet, choice, remains s paramount. The United States of America are the world in microcosm, As Above, So Below.
Independence Day is international in scope. The future of this nation, of the world, rests in our collective hands. If America chooses to step up and face its truth head on. Admit its sins. Act to release rather than compound them. Work to live up to its founding documents rather than interpret them selectively and in support of its primary dysfunction.
The world is watching, as ever. Our extended family hopes for the best, but expects the worst. What do we expect from ourselves? There is a quote that states that to whom much is given much is required. Perhaps that might have something to do with the straits we currently find ourselves in, politically, socially and economically.
Attempting to reclaim a fictitious and fanciful past has never worked for any civilization. It has only led to irrelevancy and consignment to the dustbin of history. Moving forward, dynamic, harnessing the strength of technology and natural diversity is the path of strength and confidence, rather than that of fear and weakness.
We can get with this or we can get with that. The choice is ours.
