National Symbols

And here I am, back again. Greetings.

It is my intention to muse here, as I ought to do, given my blog's title. I do not intend to take a particular side in this issue at the present moment. I cannot even guarantee the integrity of my postal infrastructure--I may ramble. Bear with me.

The topic of this post was incited by something brought up in the Tabletalk family devotional booklet my family uses in the evenings. Having had several theological or philosophical ideas float through my head that I never quite ended up posting here, I decided that enough is enough and that I should post this here. I want this blog to be much more active.

I said I might ramble. On to what the writer of Tabletalk actually said. He was discussing the phrase "give us day by day our daily bread" from Luke 11: 3. He mentioned that bread, as the staple of the Judean diet in a time when food had to be freshly prepared every day (on account of a paucity of preservation methods), was a nationally-recognized symbol of Life.

This got me thinking about America. We have not only advanced food-preservation techniques but also a ubiquity of food. From tofu to trout, from burgers to bagels, and from chicken to chai tea, we are exposed to a variety of food never shared by another culture until the present day. It is fashionable for any major city to feature restaurants of at least Mexican, Italian, and Asian food. German, French, Arabic, Texan, and so on are also available if one looks in the right places. What this means is that America does not really have a particular staple that symbolizes anything. Followers of the Atkins diet may not find much meaning in "I am the bread of life," and objectors to dairy or sugar products may be little moved by "a land flowing with milk and honey."

Extrapolating this principle a little, I seem to find that America's two most defining traits are these: liberty, and its cousin diversity. Neither of these (I speak of liberty as commonly and I believe wrongly interpreted as the right to do whatever you want) are condusive wires for national symbols. In their cultivation of the common conception of freedom, Americans seem to have lost national symbols, perhaps even national identity, as the bitterly factional elections of the last decade or so have suggested. As I think this through I believe that I am coming down more on one side than another, for it seems to me that America, in its frenetic stranglehold on the concept of diversity, has actually produced division. By constructing artifical barriers between government and religion, between race and race, between crippled and whole, and so on, America has created a nation that is beginning to lose a national identity.

Is this a bad thing? Maybe. I don't know for sure. I do know that what is a powerful symbol for me may not mean much to an African-American slum dweller in Los Angeles or a deconstructionist literary professor in Massachusetts. I'm not saying that we should all be forced to some lowest common denominator of shared standards. But maybe if America started to have more of a sense of itself, we wouldn't have a problem in this department. It took the minds of geniuses to unite us for revolution in 1776, but they did it by appealing to common values. I wonder if even Ben Franklin could do that now.

Thoughts?