With the July Fourth weekend once again upon us we look forward to summer’s formal entrance with backyard picnics and/or other family and friends gatherings of increasing dimension, whether at home or elsewhere. There is also the increased safety factor that automatically comes with heavier summer traffic, (i.e. police patrol of speed limits that vary with newly effective driving regulations applicable from state-to-state and even within different localities of same cities and states, regarding message texting, emailing and any number of other risks that may endanger safe travel whether at home or on the highways.
Subsequently local celebrations are becoming increasingly popular and more appealing as the annual Salem Fair for example. But one thing for certain is that Americans love celebrations and the birth of this revered nation remains a prime cause.
Yet, “From its inception the United States was unlike other nations,” we are reminded in the Baha’i Holy Writings. The country had been settled by pilgrims who sought to build in the wilderness of a virtually unknown continent, a “New Jerusalem.” Yet their pursuit of the Kingdom quickly revealed paradoxes that would plague their descendants ever after. How typical it is for those who seek freedom from oppression, persecution and injustice, upon finding it, proceed tenaciously to close the portals to others. Even more ironic is the 1705 declaration of the Virginia Assembly stating, “No Negro, mulatto or Indian shall presume to take upon him, act in or exercise any office, ecclesiastic, civil or military.”
Blacks were forbidden to serve as witnesses in court cases and were condemned to lifelong servitude unless they had been either Christian in their native land or free men in a Christian country.
“Professing Christianity, the pilgrims nevertheless dispossessed and massacred the origin al inhabitants of a land to which they themselves had come in quest of refuge. Victims of religious intolerance, they established a puritan tyranny in their new home. Vociferous champions of human dignity and freedom, they imported hundreds of thousands of slaves whose toil helped clear the woods, drain the swamps and raise the crops. Fearful o a stern God and wishing to do His will, they produced a government of laws and much lawlessness. Above all they were dominated by a sense of destiny and mission.
Yet America’s pursuit of wealth and power had an odd quality about it. Below the surface of the struggle for existence, of selfishness and of greed, often elevated into principle, there survived the conviction that the country had an historical task to perform that America was an experiment which would demonstrate that the brotherhood of man was an illusion, that justice for all was not an idle dream. Perhaps it was this inner conviction that impelled the educated to create in this country the world’s first and largest system of mass education, the Whites to struggle for the rights of the Blacks and the rich to engage in philanthropy on a scale unparalleled elsewhere.
Only on a scale of unparalleled peace and unity can America ultimately resolve the paradoxes of the past and cure the ills of the present. The longer she neglects her world=historical obligation, the deeper she will sink in the mire of moral and spiritual degeneration.
Separatism, however, is not the answer to the American dilemma. Order is required and the strongest source of order is spiritual. Many might think that the very possibility that such an order might still make the United States a nation of nations–E Pluribus Unum–is nothing but a dream. But the genius of American life lies in its unprecedented capacity to release for constructive purposes the energies and abilities of common men and women, ironically released under the administrative order of a Black President!
Let us hope that the challenge before Americans today might well awaken within the nation the latent spiritual forces which would make the dream a reality. For upon the results of this American experiment depends in large measure, the future not only of the Americans themselves but of the whole human race–well represented within her shores!
Also of magnitude is a quote from the Baha’i Holy Writings, “As the black pupil gives sight to the eyes, so too shall the Black people give religious sight to the world!” Investigate!
