No, it is not about Barbra Streisand's movie
What are we? Who are we? Where do we come from? Who made all this? Is there a soul? Do we somehow transcend the end of our biological life span? What is faith? What is religion? What purpose do we have as a species in a miniscule speck of an infinite universe?
Or you may ask: “who did what, where and when for how much to whom? and get ambivalent answers.
I have always said that man doesn’t have sufficient intelligence to even begin to deal with these questions. Perhaps 100,000 years from now if we survive things might become more transparent. But I do know this: religion is all fabricated, it is harmful and evil and it is a means of those who have the power to repress the majority for one purpose or another, be it greed or validation; however, I am not going to immerse myself in a mud puddle of superstition and ignorance and embrace some religious dogma that is even more outlandish and improbable that the possible answers to those questions.
When we apply some of these questions to the very existence of our country…America as a special place of either our birth or our choosing, then there are some common sense and logical answers. Who are we as a people? What is it that makes us so special, or put another way: what is American exceptionalism?
Surely, you don’t think that the Founding Fathers had it in their agenda to relinquish their concepts of fairness and democratic participation to business concerns or religious institutions…theirs was a very radical departure from what was mainstream at the time…it was an insistence in instituting the noble and ancient concept of participatory democracy.
We somehow struggled for more than 200 years with the survival of our nation and those principles the Founding Fathers left us as a legacy…at times there were insurmountable challenges that seemed to betray that quest and the very existence of our society was at best questionable.
We have again reached one of those moments in our history; a time when all our valued principles and concepts of who we are as a nation and what is our future has come to serious challenge; and just like in a duel one or the other has to fight to the death until one prevails. That is our crossroads, which is our reality.
This much I know: I clearly see the threats to our nation and who we are as a society coming from Wall Street, the banks and some of the wealthy that are motivated by greed and selfishness; moreover, it also comes from religious fanaticism that is seeking to gain absolute power and establish a theocracy and this is motivated by their need to find validation of their fabricated theologies. Then of course is the most egregious one: that which is making many Americans celebrate ignorance and a rejection of all intellectual endeavor, ignore science, facts and wants to wipe out meritocracy as one of our principles.
The optimist in me tells me that there is hope…there is the hope that common sense and reason will prevail; there is the hope that stupidity, ignorance and superstition will give way to enlightened endeavor; there is the hope of putting compassion and empathy before greed and selfishness…it has happened before to other civilizations, and we have to learn more from them, learn their mistakes and be determined not to repeat them.
Certainly there is no excuse for any human being to live off the labor and efforts of another; there is no room in mankind for this selfish stance because it is not just about the survival and power, comfort and privilege of a few at the expense of the majority…we are a society and we are in this together, sharing our fate and our challenges. There is no need to make life more difficult than it already is to satisfy the greed and selfishness of the very few.
I believe this with all the fibers of my body, with all the passion and convictions that makes me a free thinking, progressive human being and I adhere to the principle that it is every man’s duty to leave this world a little better than he found it.
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