Born on the fifth of July

Images of the Fife and Drums at Lexington pervaded our classic upbringing on the celebrative Fourth of July. Tom Cruise playing the paraplegic Vietnam vet in Oliver Stone’s diatribe against the Vietnam War (a war which, tit for tat, is called the American War in Vietnam) fed on dissonance of our contemporary personalities and culture. It is Liberation day in the CNMI, the fifty-eighth this year, as opposed to just being the recalling of the invasion two years before by U.S. forces to claim the territory from entrenched forces of imperial Japan.

Historians have written extensively on the powerful dissent of the governed enshrined in the Declaration of the Independence, which would be followed 20 years later by the consent of the governed in the Constitution of the United States of America. This interplay between the consent and the dissent of the governed has pretty much defined the nature of American governance in the last two centuries.

The fourth of July is also a time to paint momentary but bursting images in the sky. Let me ‘paint’ some mental pictures in broad strokes. Maybe, they may not stay momentary. I would hope that they might explode some old images.

At the dawn of human history, the human mind domesticated the environment by naming the forces that s/he was up against. This experience of up-against-ness created self-awareness, along with a theocratic mind—a dependence on Divine Providence accompanied by a defiant struggle against the Great Arbiter of human volition. Destiny was known by unraveling the “design of the Mysterious Other that (later, anthropomorphized into a ‘who’) is not me.” The various forms of ancient civilizations may be understood (one among many paths) by how people dealt with the “awesome reality that is not me.” The resultant theocratic mind still remains with us, and fanatic practitioners of its varied manifestations, particularly those oblating to a highly exclusive transcendent diety, continue to wreak havoc to contemporary geo-politics around the world.

With the flowering of the Graeco-Roman Empire, the notion of history as purposeful existence was added to the human mind and for more than two centuries, the debate was whether history was guided by an Invisible hand (including sheer chance, a throw of the dice in the cosmic spheres), or whether it is willed by the minds of individuals and socially-bonded endeavors.

Human history took an evolutionary leap with the advent of the enlightenment in Europe that found expression in the French Revolution’s declared aims for human “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite.” It is the same spirit that birthed American defiance against imperial authority on July 4, 1776, bringing to fore the conviction of inalienable rights that would include “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

For almost three hundred years, so-called progressive forces have been pushing measures that made the general well-being of all humanity as its vision and mission.

Come now, the day after yesterday today, the fifth of July, a breed that has grasped a new vision and embarked on a new mission. Beyond the humanistic goals that were the edge thinking post-Medieval age, the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, there is an awakening to the reality of an open-ended planetary system. This system, aesthetically presented as the “Earthrise” from one of the Apollo mission-to-the-moon shorts, shifted our mistaken notion of a static planet spinning on inviolate natural laws set for all eternity, to a vibrant living, breathing globule called the Planet Earth.

From the humanity-centered ideals that guided the creation of our American experiment in enlightened sociopolitical union, we embark into a paradigm shift that sees the human enterprise as just one force among many determining the planetary course to unexplored and unknown horizons.

So, to those interested in the enterprise of creating a viable social ethics and facilitating an effective societal transformation—radicals, conservatives and liberals of all colorations—the first premise should at least be this: the master context can no longer be the human race; the primary premise must be the well-being of the planet.

Whether one’s specialty is water conservation or transformative education, mental health or rocket engineering, information technology or social welfare, criminal justice or corporate accounting, one must create a context both broad and profound. Only such context can be motivating in the short term, and self-sustaining in the long haul.

Humans have not always played a mutually self-enhancing role in its relationship to the planet. Facts about the effect of our oil consumption, our driving preferences and habits as more objects of indifference at best, denial at worst, in the same fashion as we shelved the reality of tobacco smoking’s impact on health not too long ago, than serious items in determining our social behavior.

Nor can we continue to remain parochial in defense of our tribal/nationalistic allegiances (e.g. Chamorro, Carolinian, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc.), or continue with our culture of choice (e.g., Eastern, Western, Latin civilizations, etc.). Instead, a conscious effort can be made toward a new mode of social organization that is based on post-civilization, post-tribal ethos. One must create an alternative vision other than the one birthed to us by the fourth of July. To parody the vision in its current worn-out form, this once enlightening vision was the belief that perpetual economic growth driven by the free enterprise of technologically inventive humans will make kings and queens of all people. The Enlightenment in its glory days was a needed deliverance from the “endarkenment” of a stodgy, obsolete, devil-infested, medieval Europe.

Yet, following the pattern established by the tradition of the Fourth of July, we also must begin with the dissent of the concerned. That dissent must be forceful in confronting those institutions and systems that rock along the delusion that we can make of everyone among the six billion of us kings and queens in accord with the middle-class standards of a developed industrial society. At current standards, this would take the resources of several planets, at least 3 at minimum, perhaps, easily 20

The drama for resource depletion, under a democratic free enterprise system, is a contest being wage by the rich industrialized nations. Fresh water is the most severe limit we face; oil is an interesting example that has even gotten stodgy National Geographic to declare in its June issue the “End of Cheap Oil.” The United States and China already have exceeded the capacities of their home-produced oil; and for their still growing addiction to this convenient fuel, they depend upon the larger pools still cheaply extracted in the Middle East. In fact, we are seeing the grim drama of the U.S., England, France, Germany, Russia, China, India and other economies positioning themselves like dirty hyenas to drink from these pools their remaining billions of barrels of black wealth. A similar deadly and dangerous drama will develop around natural gas, coal, metals, water, arable land, forests, ocean fish, and even the air we breath.

Lucid members of the well-to-do have already ceased to speak of “raising all boats.” The myth surrounding the “Skulls and Bones” out of Yale, of which the older Bush is a known member, is already making a paranoid-shift among conspiracy buffs about the role of New England moneyed elite in determining the course of post-WWII America. Many will settle for keeping their own boat afloat while knowing full well that the put-through of resources corralled by every millionaire results in pushing a host of others to the brink of survival. This trend of history is much worse than unsustainable; it is vicious, deadly, demoralizing, and ugly.

Thus, the task of those born on the fifth of July is a formidable one. There needs a powerful articulation of the vision of a One Earth. There is a hardheaded confrontation of existing institutions that are impeding that vision. Strategies are to be designed to move a society in denial en masse to a new enlightenment. A social movement to promote effective transformation needs organizing. These tasks remain to be this columns thoughts—through the rest of the lazy days of summer.

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(Vergara is a Social Studies 6th grade teacher at San Vicente Elementary School and writes a regular column for the Saipan Tribune.)