Some thoughts looking forward to the 4th of July ...

The trajectory of the culture of these United States of America is that of one of our own 4th of July celebration rockets. We have reached our zenith and we are now exploding.

Another way of picturing us is as an economic engine that is running way above maximum safe rpm’s and is shaking apart.

The only question remaining is how much damage we will inflict on ourselves and others if we break up.

Greed is as ancient as squirrels hoarding nuts for winter, and can be rationalized in a myriad of ways. But human beings do not survive as solitary individuals. It is the manner in which we open the potential of the future to each new generation that they find the motivation to go forward, and move society with them.

Youth on the path to adulthood will seek those avenues that hold promise for them, at times even minute by minute. If the “straight and narrow” does not yield or hold the promise of yielding the results/goals their psyche desires/needs, many will find other routes—not all of them beneficial to society.

Certainly limiting access to alpha status by shrinking the identifying genetic markers to a smaller and smaller pool is self-defeating for the larger society. George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States, is the perfect example of the severity of the damage that can be caused by limiting leadership to one family tree.

Looking at those cultures that have survived for millennia, we consistently find widespread opportunity across a wide segment of the society for those from even the lowest strata of that segment to reach positions of cultural leadership ... and the broader the opportunity throughout the society, the more dynamic the society.

Catholicism has long afforded the opportunity to the lowliest child to rise through the ranks to priesthood, bishop, cardinal, and even pope. The mosques of Islam are open to all, and the current recruitment into Al Qaeda through the “open to all male children” policy of the fundamentalist madrassas portends a momentum we have yet to even begin to counter.

In China the public schools offer academic opportunity to a wide swath of the population, a population that has more gifted members than we have total members—if we take the top 25 percentile as the gifted group. And we—instead—are curtailing academic opportunity on the basis of individual family income, and in fact excluding broad groups from any real opportunity to advance into “ordained” leadership, except as token representatives of their groups.

All trajectories have momentum, even societal ones. We have yet to begin to correct our current course governed by our individual self-interest as the highest good. I believe the explosion we are now experiencing will dramatically alter our course. The question is will we surrender to fear and pursue corporatist fascism, or will we re-exert our commitment to offering equal opportunity to the world’s diverse peoples and regain the breathtaking momentum of our birth as a nation, flawed as it was?