The USA Was Never Meant to be Just White

Growing up in multi-ethnic, though ethnically regionalized Detroit,  I never heard the iconic slur 'Dirty Jew" but I did hear about the Detroit race war of 1943. My family employed a black cleaning lady and she disappeared much to my family's consternation and concern for her welfare. Thirty-four people were killed, three-fourths being black in that three-day melee.White commissioners attributed the cause to black hoodlums and youths, though the real cause was wartime competition for jobs and housing by huge waves of African-American and white migrants from the deep South. Despite my parents' efforts, they were never able to discover the fate of the lovely woman who had worked for them. She lingers in my earliest memory among the ghosts of World War II and the Holocaust, except that she inhabited our homelife. She is for me a lasting, very personal exemplar of the abrogation of social justice.Our Declaration of Independence, written to declare and explain our separation from  tyrannical Britain, states "all men are created equal." The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution put that position legally in place: "no state shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."Our American revolution established the first multi-ethnic country in human history. America remains the only socially, religiously, sexually, and racially equal country by its founding principles. Our greatness, our exceptionalism, rests on that legally committed ideal, even as it has had to be further elaborated and explicated by law and jurisprudence.Our commitment to freedom of expression protects much that has politically divided the country, with facings off between protection of independence and preservation of equal unity. The right to bear arms continues to run up against the right to freedom from tyranny, which, of course, includes genocide. And genocide is defined as the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group. Ethnic, racial and religious minorities, LGBT persons, and school kids continue to be targeted for extermination here in totally free America. We solemnly promise to remain committed to the protection of all constitutionally guaranteed rights. But it ain't easy.In Joanne Greenberg's novel "I never promised you a rose garden," the title's now iconic utterance is delivered to a young, mentally ill patient by her psychiatrist. The patient is the protagonist of this autobiographical book. The quote is both a statement of the harsh reality we all must face and an embrocation, implying that the garden needs both tending and protection. America annointed itself to provide and nurture that garden: "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.".

"Lashed to these "primitive" brain structures, our rational, logical frontal cortex is never in complete control, never wholly independent and sometimes irrationally overtaken."

.We are not living in good times. Television and the internet make this reality ever more evident, always in our faces. We no longer live at the safe remove of continental separations or national boundaries or even neighborhood fences. We watch countries like Iraq and Syria being decimated. We see the immediate aftermath of terrorist attacks and mass shootings. We watch our own government lurching and disordering itself and wonder at the outcome.We are clearly not readily up to executing consistently and continually the ideals that determine who we are — Americans. But if we let them fall away, we will take the world with us into a new Dark Age, as bleak and war-torn and regressive and stagnant as the thousand years between the fall of Rome in the fourth century and the Renaissance.that began in the 1400's.All this stürm und drang we owe to our poor brains, poor because though outfitted for the creativity and inventiveness and empathy with which it is endowed, our brain evolves too slowly. Our mental capacities have failed to keep up with the ideals it promulgates. The frontal cortex, the master of cognition and strategizing is necessarily linked to deeper structures, most of which we share with reptiles and even insects. These brain structures evolved under the Law of the Jungle. Our existence, like all living things, occupies a world of predation. The thrust to survive, as powerful in humans today as it was eons ago, has left us with such burdens as fear and hatred of foreigners, competitive mating, psychological defense mechanisms, temperament volatility, obsessive and addictive susceptivity, and so on. Lashed to these "primitive" brain structures, our rational, logical frontal cortex is never in complete control, never wholly independent and sometimes irrationally overtaken.We Americans have set a difficult task for ourselves, difficult to allow us to fully engage and realize our fundamental, legally embedded ideals. We have to resist the ever-encroaching jungle fever within us.We are the leaders of the free world. Let us — please — lead.