As a kid, as a callow young man, I had trouble trying to understand what all that East Coast nonsense about the first thirteen colonies was all about. All that arm-wrestling about joining, or not joining the Union, about forming a national government, was presented in the dusty, dry terms of centralization, or not, in terms of having one's own State militia, or not, in terms of Protestant or Catholic sensibilities or savageries. It--frankly--made almost no sense to me.
I had never lived in a Colony. I was born into the Union.
So here I am, dangerously close to becoming 81, if I survive this sinus infection--which I am beating into submission by sticking something up my nose and spraying it (which is, itself, curiously reminiscent of another, more recent revolution)--that is to say, at long last it occurs to me that all those arguments took place at a time when we were not yet a nation: we were colonies, and it was not yet obvious to all of them that we were, or going to become, a continentally-wide entity. They were Massachusetts, and New York, and South Carolina. There was not yet a United States of America.
To put the whole debate into our history books as if it were a matter of fine distinctions about taxation, or representation, or almost anything else, simply obscures the fact that, at the time, people knew that they were part of something larger than their own villages and towns, but it was not a national identity: they knew, and felt, that they were a part of Vermont, or Virginia. They knew that they were Virginians, or North Carolinians! They did not know, or feel, that they were Americans, and not Canadians, or Mexicans. I am not sure they thought of Canadians as a Canadian nation, either, but it wasn't yet, either. (It is still part of the Commonwealth, isn't it? Ah, Canada!)
That is to say, nationhood is as much a psychological achievement as it is a political or territorial one. New York, for instance, had to be coaxed into the Union, because it was a large, powerful colony that felt that it could do very well without compromising its "sovereignty". And I, growing up in Washington State, had never felt "colonial". States weren't "sovereign".
All of that has come tumbling down upon my dismal awareness in the last few weeks. Hurricane Sandy, much more than Hurricane Katrina that devastated New Orleans, seems to have taken aim, not just at a city or a state, but at what holds us together; at the fact that when--let me put it this way!--when that hurricane devastated the colony of New York, or New Jersey, all of us recognized that those colonies were a part of what we are: a nation!
The destruction in New Orleans was no less savage, and certainly more frequent, but we tend to think of it as a weather issue, or a geographic issue, a river issue, a city built below sea level. Since I am not a Louisianan, I only guess that from that perspective, it is an issue of nationhood, of needing help from one's fellow citizens, but for many of us, seeing the huge, open sores along our eastern seaboard, at a symbolic center of our population, is not a matter of damage to some of the colonies, but to the nation! Hurricane Sandy, occurring precisely as some Americans are asserting the uselessness of our national identity and institutions, raised the original debate to consciousness.
We have matured beyond being a collection of colonies, to nationhood, somehow: almost.
Almost. Slavery got in our way. The Civil War is stuck in our craw. The issues of the Civil War, and racial superiority are in our way. We had not even yet come to terms with the fact that at least 10% of our population is Black, when we discovered that more than 10% is Hispanic, and that large numbers of our people are Asian. In a few decades, we will have no neat "white majority". We will all be minorities: one very large minority (White), but not an absolute majority. It doesn't matter that our largest city is New York City; that the Colony of New York was the largest colony. Hurricane Sandy devastated a large part of this nation.
That is what makes all that Tea Party crap about starving the nation into submission by degrading government--our Constitution of nationhood, our oneness, our sense of belonging together--and their reassertion of something like State rights, Colonial rights, so patently absurd, and so self-destructive. It is like trying to pretend that we are only adjacent colonies, again, each "a sovereign state". Nonsense!
All this talk about big business being so good for us, and government being so bad, is just an attempt to redefine who we are, not so much a nation, as corporate conglomerate.
I am not a citizen of a corporate conglomerate: I am an American, a part of a nation, and the aims and ideals of the nation are what attract me, define me, delight me--this diverse nation!
Some of our former colonies need us.
I had never lived in a Colony. I was born into the Union.
So here I am, dangerously close to becoming 81, if I survive this sinus infection--which I am beating into submission by sticking something up my nose and spraying it (which is, itself, curiously reminiscent of another, more recent revolution)--that is to say, at long last it occurs to me that all those arguments took place at a time when we were not yet a nation: we were colonies, and it was not yet obvious to all of them that we were, or going to become, a continentally-wide entity. They were Massachusetts, and New York, and South Carolina. There was not yet a United States of America.
To put the whole debate into our history books as if it were a matter of fine distinctions about taxation, or representation, or almost anything else, simply obscures the fact that, at the time, people knew that they were part of something larger than their own villages and towns, but it was not a national identity: they knew, and felt, that they were a part of Vermont, or Virginia. They knew that they were Virginians, or North Carolinians! They did not know, or feel, that they were Americans, and not Canadians, or Mexicans. I am not sure they thought of Canadians as a Canadian nation, either, but it wasn't yet, either. (It is still part of the Commonwealth, isn't it? Ah, Canada!)
That is to say, nationhood is as much a psychological achievement as it is a political or territorial one. New York, for instance, had to be coaxed into the Union, because it was a large, powerful colony that felt that it could do very well without compromising its "sovereignty". And I, growing up in Washington State, had never felt "colonial". States weren't "sovereign".
All of that has come tumbling down upon my dismal awareness in the last few weeks. Hurricane Sandy, much more than Hurricane Katrina that devastated New Orleans, seems to have taken aim, not just at a city or a state, but at what holds us together; at the fact that when--let me put it this way!--when that hurricane devastated the colony of New York, or New Jersey, all of us recognized that those colonies were a part of what we are: a nation!
The destruction in New Orleans was no less savage, and certainly more frequent, but we tend to think of it as a weather issue, or a geographic issue, a river issue, a city built below sea level. Since I am not a Louisianan, I only guess that from that perspective, it is an issue of nationhood, of needing help from one's fellow citizens, but for many of us, seeing the huge, open sores along our eastern seaboard, at a symbolic center of our population, is not a matter of damage to some of the colonies, but to the nation! Hurricane Sandy, occurring precisely as some Americans are asserting the uselessness of our national identity and institutions, raised the original debate to consciousness.
We have matured beyond being a collection of colonies, to nationhood, somehow: almost.
Almost. Slavery got in our way. The Civil War is stuck in our craw. The issues of the Civil War, and racial superiority are in our way. We had not even yet come to terms with the fact that at least 10% of our population is Black, when we discovered that more than 10% is Hispanic, and that large numbers of our people are Asian. In a few decades, we will have no neat "white majority". We will all be minorities: one very large minority (White), but not an absolute majority. It doesn't matter that our largest city is New York City; that the Colony of New York was the largest colony. Hurricane Sandy devastated a large part of this nation.
That is what makes all that Tea Party crap about starving the nation into submission by degrading government--our Constitution of nationhood, our oneness, our sense of belonging together--and their reassertion of something like State rights, Colonial rights, so patently absurd, and so self-destructive. It is like trying to pretend that we are only adjacent colonies, again, each "a sovereign state". Nonsense!
All this talk about big business being so good for us, and government being so bad, is just an attempt to redefine who we are, not so much a nation, as corporate conglomerate.
I am not a citizen of a corporate conglomerate: I am an American, a part of a nation, and the aims and ideals of the nation are what attract me, define me, delight me--this diverse nation!
Some of our former colonies need us.
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