Skip to main content

Hurricane Irma Reveals How Nationalistic America Really Is

It's interesting how the Weather Channel seems to treat the devastation of the Caribbean, even American territories, as precursors to what they have identified as the event, otherwise known as landfall upon the continental United States.

For the people presently facing Irma, the event is happening now.

The reason this is important is that it implies a lot about the way we view the world and its inhabitants.

Although the political map clearly illustrates borders between nations, views from the International Space Station reveal that these boundaries are mere imaginary lines drawn by history's political pundits whose self-interested motives altogether failed to represent the unanimous consensus of the time, and yet they fail even more miserably in that capacity today.


Notwithstanding the fact that we are all inhabitants of this earth, of the same species and familiar family dispositions, we are subliminally inculcated by political representations of this terrestrial world to assume that those political borders render us inherently different, or in some cases better purely because we reside on the preferred side of the line.

Until we recognize that the composition of a life depends upon factors beyond government jurisdiction or national identity, until we appreciate the value of a life on the basis of its uniqueness beyond those superficial identifiers, we are condemned to perpetuate and fortify the concrete and intellectual borders which prevent us from understanding, valuing and collaborating with the eclecticism of this world.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Deal with Tariffs

Over the course of President Trump’s two terms, there has been much talk around the matter of tariffs — taxes on imported goods. However, much of the talk seems to miss the point. After all, for those of us who seek the truth, it’s not really a question of whether tariffs are ‘good’ but whether they are preferable to other kinds of taxes — assuming, of course, that taxes are the rule, as certain as the eventuality of death. First, let’s establish the theory: beyond the generic purpose of revenue generation for the state, the institution of tariffs ordinarily serves to  reduce (or discourage) imports by making them artificially more expensive, while encouraging domestic production by making domestic products more appealing on a relative price basis. In the realm of foreign affairs, tariffs are instituted or threatened in the course of international trade negotiations in order to signal dissatisfaction with existing trade barriers and to push for more favorable trade terms; or in ord...

Summarizing the “Separation of Church and State”

There is much confusion surrounding the concept of the “separation of church and state”; much of it likely born out of the steep secular decline in religious affiliation across recent generations, with particular emphasis among atheists and anti-deists.  While many have hastened to leverage this language (“separation of church and state”) in order to condemn or censure religious values — particularly those which are Christian — where they have carried influence in public life (i.e. prayer in schools, teachers covering lessons from the Bible, government representatives appealing to God, coinage bearing the words “In God We Trust”), the truth is that this “separation” was never expected to completely eliminate religious practice or religious sentiment from all matter of public life. In fact, religion was so deeply enmeshed in American life during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the French magistrate and prison reformer Gustave de Beaumont, during his nine-month tour of A...

Rethinking “Forgiveness”

Forgiveness is often hailed as the ultimate moral virtue — a cleansing of the soul, a sign of spiritual maturity, and the first step toward healing fractured relationships. But in modern discourse, particularly in religious and pop-psychological circles, “forgiveness” has extended beyond the sensible, beyond etiquette, and beyond justice and useful application. The concept of “forgiveness” has been stretched far outside of the realms of that which is easy to “forgive”, that which is merely inconvenient or annoying, or relatively innocuous or insignificant, where “forgiveness” is merely part of tolerating people’s human shortcomings, their mistakes and  their accidents , or extending ‘mercy’ to those who’ve disrespected or “trespassed against us” (and have since offered sincere apologies and the necessary restitution). This reimagined kind of “forgiveness” has taken on a dangerously idealized form ignorant to or dismissive of the laws and limits of human nature and the potential imp...