I was watching a news piece regarding an Olympian sprinter, Maurice Greene, representing America while proudly displaying the tattoo on his deep brown skin and it occurred to me what a wonderfully efficient machine our diversity makes. Someone can exhibit their inherent disposition as a child, concentrate on what they love and do best, and fill such a niche to a paragon; while all over other people are doing the same for other things, from the athletes to the craftsmen, mathematicians, research scientists, forensic detectives and military strategists. The person develops, able to focus on their work, their part in the society, like a part of a body.
There are hands and engineers to build our homes; eyes to see and visionaries to warn people or invent things; nerves to feel and research groups to determine public opinion. In the same fashion, like the micro/macro-verse, it goes on as the different countries interact like people and make up the body of humanity. We haven�t got it quite right yet, and we don�t work together on the bigger levels yet, but the concept is clearly there as we careen through the wild ride of our youth as a species. This is a very old concept, and by no means new to me, but I finally fully understood it in a different light.
As intricately exquisite a picture as that is, it is also absolutely abusable. Just like in a person, sometimes the nation isn�t sure which part of the mind is actually speaking: is this the id being overly selfish, or the superego being overly self righteous; right wing extremists being too cold and business like, or religious "right" deciding everyone has the right to worship their idea of the correct God... Really, we must not lose sight of what is important in life and that it must be balanced, not too generous, not too callous, or we lose our humanity. This is how atrocities are committed under the cold and callous orders of leaders who never see the bloodshed for themselves. This is how Custer was able to follow the orders to slaughter whole villages of women and children while luring the men out to a diversionary battle; how German farmers could don Nazi uniforms and bulldoze piles of scrawny, abused bodies into ditches, and how All-American youth looking soldiers could round up thousands of civilians to imprison on the grounds that there is a chance that they might be enemies or strafe attack wedding parties.
The common belief seems to be that cells of a body do not have a say in what activities they participate in. I do not believe that is fully the case, and sometimes we feel it. When one is in unexpected danger, the hairs rise, goose bumps form, the body tries desperately to warn the brain to get us the heck out of there. Likewise, when the country heads into dishonor, the citizens who see it (even when it isn�t their job) try every method we can to warn the rest of the country. Sometimes the body does shut down rather than go along with the brain is suggesting at the moment. Making our own brains more receptive to our very cells is an arduous adventure into the unknown, certainly a worthy goal, but not my subject here.
My Idea here is to make our magnificent machine more organic. To allow the flow of information and input so that the brain makes the most informed decision, to strengthen the checks and balances (rather than sawing away at them with "acts" and amendments to enforce the central opines) so that the brain is more balanced, and capable of behaving in the global community as well as we require our populace to. If every Citizen were to pay attention to what the nation is doing, rather than always blindly taking the brain�s word for it, we will be able force a re-assessment before America the Beautiful Body steps into another hornet�s nest (maybe next time it will be rattlesnakes or cobras!) while doing "our thing".