". . . of the United States of America . . ."

Sometimes the simplest concepts are the hardest to define.

What, exactly, is the United States of America? Is it a bold experiment in a new model of social governance, or simply a new canvas on which the same dreary formulas are plastered? Is it a land of opportunity, where any person with a strong back and a willingness to labor can succeed, or is it an oligarchy where those who have hold on to what they have while depriving those who have not of the opportunity to have by extracting as much moral, spiritual, and physical wealth from them as possible?

Is the United States of America a land of equal opportunity, or is it a land of equal opportunity for those whose skins are the right color, and who come from the right ethnic and social and religious background?* Are nonconformists welcomed in the United States of America, or has the world's melting pot so completely embraced homogenization that those who stand out do so only to become targets?

A great buzzword of the past 15 years or so in American society has been "diversity." We Americans must embrace diversity, we must encourage diversity, we must welcome diversity, and we must teach diversity. The race to diversify our society has been met, in many ways and in many places, with a reactionary push toward confirmityh and homogeneity.

This is not necessarily bad. I am no fan of the "PC police." They have so hobbled social discourse with their insistence that no one ever be offended by anything anyone else ever says that the cacophonous babble of the citizenry which I favored above has been reduced to a stilted, intermittent rivulet, proceeding in fits and starts as the participants parse their words like chess grand masters calculating moves to the nth turn, weighing consequences and alternate courses of action. Gratuitous obnoxiousness is never socially acceptable - just ask any homosexual person whom a heterosexual fornicator wielding theepithet "FAG" has ever accosted! However, when we cannot be honest or completely candid with each other, for fear that someone may interpret that candor as an act of victimization, our public discourse is not enhanced.

I am less enamored of the ravanchist America Firsters, who want to make our society back into a circumscribed, homogenized, insipid shadow of what it could, and should, be. Conformity at any cost is as obnoxious as diversity at any cost.

That said, I have to state unequivocally that I am the foe of the exclusionists, those who would eliminate any law-abiding, orderly element in our society. I will happily breathe fire and destruction on those who presume to be the arbiters of what is and is not acceptable in our society, what will or will not be allowed access to our society.

In an earlier essay, I expounded at length on the concept of allegiance. The concept that allegiance is borne or owed toward some thing renders the concept of the United States of America more complex than it may appear on its face.

This is because to pledge allegiance to the United States of America requires that allegiance be borne to an idea, a concept, an abstraction. We are, in a concrete, tangibe sense, the United States of America because the colonists ("the English men [two words]," as I never tire of telling my students) in the English colonies along the middle Atlantic seabord of North America rebelled against the British Crown 200-plus years ago - admittedly, an act of disloyalty. Sometimes, allegiance must be withdrawn.

The United States of America, the ideal espoused in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers, etc., is more than simply the sum of our physical assets and attributes, although completely intangible. It is the idea that the people should be their own rulers, that power should be distributed out among a broader base than in the hierarchical model that had prevailed to that time.†

Yet ambition, as noted above‡, demands satisfaction in the degradation of one's neighbors. No matter how much humans claim to desire complete equality of all members of society, there is still the urge to dominance over one's fellow citizens. "All men are created equal; some are just created more equal than others" is an old joke, but it has a measure of truth. Even in a commune, there will always be a leaders, who gives instruction and orders to the others.

This is not a bad thing. Any group of people of differing skills and abilities require one person to provide focus and definition to the collective efforts of the gruop. As I have noted above, America is a place where all people, regardless of their abilities, have the right to take from society as much as their contribution to society entitles them. It is a plain fact that not everyone will be able to contribute alike to society, but all should be welcome to contribute as they are able.

The problem that arises in modern society is that society brings forth leaders, or would-be leaders, who are not worthy of the people they presume to lead. Sometimes these ambitious citizens press themselves forward into leadership. It is objectionable to the spirit of the American Experiment, when in the interest of embracing what are supposed to be the ideals of th eRepublic, the leadership of the Republic attempts to exclude from society those who, while capable and worthy of contributing to society, are deemed by the leaders (who are not the people) to be objectionable.

*I originally wrote this post more than five years ago, before non-Whites became a majority in the U.S. population, and before I moved to Texas, where social, economica and political life are fraught with the tensions between Anglos and Latinos. The subjective problem of "right"ness, which is universal and immemorial, takes on an extra dimension of volatility when applied to race and color. The question of "right" skin color, "right" ethnic, social and religious background, becomes more complicated with the rise of a Hispanic/Latino/Chicano plurality.

†On the difficulty of maintaining participatory democracy in a state that stretches "from sea to shining sea" (for which see the earlier essay, ". . . to the Flag . . .," in this series), I shall have more to say later.

‡See the essay, ". . . to the Flag . . .," in this series.