On Independence and Interdependence

This country has been surprised with the way the world looks now. They don’t know if they want…to be diplomats or continue the same policy of nuclear nightmare diplomacy…This country wants nostalgia. They want to go back as far as they can, even if it’s only as far as last week—not to face now or tomorrow, but to look backwards.” (Gil Scott-Heron, 1981)

The Godfather of Rap was dead-on. Americans celebrated their 243rd year of being an independent country on Thursday, watching the glare of bombs bursting in air to mark nearly a quarter-millennium since the founders declared that “all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

History hath shewn that, to remind us in the early 21st century how indebted we remain to the words of a late-eighteenth century document written by slaveowners who were also brilliant men part of their own time, faced against tall odds of taking on what was then the greatest empire in world history. They laid the foundation for what is now the greatest empire in world history, but Americans seem to like to think they live inside a democratic republic.

I feel that one of the reasons why we are struggling inadequately today is that we reckon our costs on too shortsighted a basis and are later overwhelmed with the unexpected costs brought about by our shortsightedness.” (Buckminster Fuller, 1968)

Bucky was right, too, and our shortsightedness has kept apace over the last half-century, as well as the damage wrought by our lack of foresight—or, if not wanting for it, maybe enough indifference or hostility to new ideas to quash dread progress. Having said that, it is undeniable that social change has been won by grassroots struggle from below, and very rarely if never from the wealthy and powerful who have always run these United States.

It may sound cynical to put it that way, but it is a little difficult to deny when you dig into things like the historical and documentary record of what actually happened around here. None of this is to say that we are condemned to the same fate as Sisyphus, forced to roll a boulder up a hill for all time, knowing it will roll down again. Maybe there are not so much repetitions in history but rhythms.