With the Fourth of July weekend, we usually find more backyard picnics with family and friends than trips to beaches or other favorite summer spots and gas price changes. There is also the safety factor with increased summer travel and with heavier traffic, heavier police patrol of speed limits, drinking and driving, and prohibiting message texting and emailing, among other travel risks that can mar a happy holiday weekend. Consequently, local celebrations are becoming more appealing and convenient. The annual Salem Fair for example, and other local attractions are becoming bigger and more popular each year. Yet one thing is certain – Americans love to celebrate and the birth of this nation is a prime cause for celebration. Yet, “From its inception, the United States was unlike other nations,” we are reminded in the Baha’i 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 Christians in their native land or free men in a Christian country.
“Professing Christianity, the pilgrims nevertheless dispossessed and massacred the original 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 of 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 which was often elevated into principle, there survived the conviction that the country had a historical task to perform, that America was an experiment that would demonstrate that the brotherhood of man was not 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 (now threatened), the Whites to struggle for the rights of the Blacks, and the rich to engage in philanthropy on a scale unparalleled elsewhere.”
Only as a champion of universal peace and unity can America ultimately resolve the paradoxes and contradictions of the past and cure the ills of the present. The longer she neglects her world-historical obligation, the deeper she would sink as 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 currently being released on her 233rd birthday under the amazingly encouraging new administrative order of a Black President.
Let us hope that the challenge today before the Americans 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.
“As the black pupil brings light to the eye, so shall the Black people bring religious sight to the world.”
HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA!
