DUCKPOND

Do the United States have a soul, a spiritual core? The health care debate, which to some is a stalking horse for other fantasies, seems to be foundering on the rock of superficial genetic division, of racial identity. Can the angels of our better nature fly?

The real issues, as Marx might have observed are now grounded in economic activity. Is it not the case that the time of the Empire and corporate rule is past? The Empire is a cancer at the heart of democracy, fatiguing it and dragging justice remorselessly under the wheels of its’ juggernaut. Even for the Empire it is a world of diffuse and merging frontiers in South America, North West Africa and Central Asia, following the retreat from South East Asia. The absurdity is that the struggle would seem to be about control of fossil fuel – oil and gas.

The insularity of nationality and economic greed given the global nature of the overwhelming problems of climate and economy is becoming irrelevant, or worse counter-productive.

So that while a form of World Government,with more reality than the deeply flawed although useful United Nations, might be problematic on many levels. The founding and experience of the American Republic in North America may be especially relevant to that necessary project. We might hope that democracy and the rule of law will reign.

How would the global electoral districts be drawn? The exigencies of empires, past and present, might be put aside making the possible for relationships of human families to be reformed. In such a context the American South might rise again in a new form. As might an amalgam of the Pacific West and the Pacific South East, uniting in that frame the Polynesian diaspora. What might be seen as incongruous, with imagination would work better than expected. Nationality would be left to fade away over the centuries.

Such thoughts are premised on the optimistic understanding of human biology and possibilities of the evolution of mind. The mirror neurons may be largely ignored, or little known, but as with the other area of the cortex they provide the basis for potentiality for realization. Our humanity will draw us together to solve our common problems with compassion, or we will perish.