I am setting off to traverse North America at a time when America’s contributions to advances in governance, education and science or to raising people out of poverty and eliminating prejudice is being truncated. It is a time when America’s promise to lead humanity into a more enlightened world-embracing perspective is being severed by snippets. Its light is dim in a world lit more by the illumination of weapons of war and flinty words than of the light of souls and of exchanges guided by respectful and loving qualities.
As I travel, I expect to find America a topic of concern both within and without its borders. We know we are all connected on this earth. What harms one part of its body resonates within another. There is a sadness to having our current illness.
Some years ago, when I was grieving the passing of my husband, I would turn lights on in rooms I knew I would enter later. The inviting light made me feel less alone as if someone was already there waiting for me. In this current world of darkness, I hope to find many spaces during my travels where regardless of political persuasion or world view, they are lit with the understanding of our common humanity and love for each other as individuals.
It is only in this celebration of our commonalities, can we reignite the promise of America or the hopes for the wellbeing of the world’s body of humanity.
Good luck, i wonder if you’ll find anything left of the old America where science meant something and empathy for each other mattered.
ReplyDeleteNico, thank you for your comment.
ReplyDeleteI found glimmers of the "old America" in the hospitality I found across the country. However, the scale of poverty in small towns and neighborhoods of color and its likely effect on education level was concerning. I traveled mostly backroads, so I dipped in and out of hamlets across mid-America. If I were in a city or fair-sized town, I would see little library boxes in neighborhoods and usually was able to find a good independent bookstore. Not so in little places or neighborhoods of color. The dollar-store-like chains which have replaced local stores in these communities don't carry books. The lack of knowing about the broader world and its people, religions, and cultures effects world views and fuels prejudices. When we have such deep inequities in wealth and lack the empathy and means to adjust the differences, we in America all suffer. When I saw little kids playing in a park in some little spot-in-the road town, I thought about how our failing them in education and healthcare would cost us as Americans. We will struggle to be a strong nation, when we don't nurture the unique capacities and spiritual lives of every child.