What would we have if we didn’t have the Empire—the American empire.?   Like MAGA.  Make America Great Again.

What would we have?  A good question.  Worth thinking about a little.   Maybe even feeling a little.  Let’s get in touch with this feeling about America the great.  What is it…a feeling of strength maybe?   A feeling of goodness?  Something big to belong to.   Something more than my little self  (big as I am in my own eyes…at least some days).

It’s natural and right to identify with some group or community beyond ourselves.   We like to belong to something bigger or greater.   Th fact is, we can’t flourish alone, any more than a stalk of corn or stem of wheat can survive, let alone flourish, alone. 

But the empire is troubled, big time, and it’s not clear that we’re getting what we need from it.  We…getting…what…we…need….that’s one way to ask what’s happening.  But it’s a pretty small way, after all, and maybe a bit selfish.   I, me, and mine.  A way of looking at the world, but kind of poverty stricken, really.  

Another way to think about what “we” have would be to start with a bigger “we”—a much bigger we.  We could, when we say “we the people” mean we the people, all of us, who inhabit this little blue globe of a planet.  

We Americans could be thinking of “we the human family” which we totally forgot in the exploited trauma of 9/11.  I called the human family  “our other family” in a previous blog.  We could expand whatever small or large goodness we have known in our biological family to a much larger family.  Family is the place of second and third and more chances.  It is what, in some form, gave us each and all our start.  

What if we didn’t have the Empire. and decided instead to build our lives around the human family.  That is, we could become honest about the fact that as a human species we will either survive by cooperation or die by greed and war.  If that is not true, the earth is flat.  If we cannot see that, we think that the earth is flat.  

We could begin to imagine solving problems rather than making war as the way to live in a family.  That would be instead of empire.  A plan big enough to make a difference, and small enough to start with one’s own circle of friends.  “Our other family” could be a family where we do to each other what we would like done to us.  

 John K. Stoner 9/29/21