Part Two
Human beings are all members of one body.
They are created from the same essence.
When one member is in pain,
The others cannot rest.
If you do not care about the pain of others,
You do not deserve to be called a human being."
(13th century Persian poet, Mosleh al-Din Saadi Shirazi)
Of critical importance is how Americans view God. According to a year old Gallup phone poll, 72% of our citizens are Christian but there are many variations in our beliefs, traditions and even the way we pray. 25% of us are Catholics, 16% are Baptists, and 13% of us claim no religion or an undesignated religion (the latter generally means some faith that conforms to no established ones, which includes self-designed beliefs). 9% are Methodists, 6% are Lutherans and no other church claims more than 3% of our population. Jewish believers make up 2%.
Because many Muslims in the US refuse to take part in polls or, as recent immigrants, lack phones, it’s impossible as yet to gain a clear picture of their numbers. However, Muslim leaders in the US claim it is 3% of our population. Other polls suggest it is less than that.
A clearer picture of religious choices and social beliefs – including American views about Muslims and Islam, emerges in this Pew Center poll released last March: pewforum.org
This should make it clear that most Americans do not consider our country to be at war with Islam.
Freedom of religion is considered an important foundation of our society. Only when religions practice criminal acts, like assault, murder, theft, etc. do they run afoul of our laws. Some of our earliest European settlers were fleeing religious persecution there, and though some persecution occurred in towns and cities in our earliest days, when we officially became a nation more than two centuries ago, we made religious freedom a cornerstone in our Constitutional government. Today, even people imprisoned are granted rights and facilities that permit the practice of individual choices of faith.
Much is known worldwide of our other freedoms. We can speak, pray, publish, and assemble with others without being prosecuted. We have procedural rights in court trials; we can refuse to give testimony about ourselves, do not have to answer questions asked by police, and are granted rights to be represented by lawyers even if we can’t afford them.
Most of these rights were crafted by the very perceptive and intelligent men who created our government. Men like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Ben Franklin borrowed good ideas from other societies, including ancient Greece and Native American Indian societies in existence during their time.
Other freedoms took time and painful experiences to come into being, like freedom from slavery for black Americans, and certain property and voting rights for former slaves and women. And as our society created more freedoms, we grew economically and in world influence.
It’s central to our social and world view that other nations can prosper and grow by increasing personal freedoms. For most Americans, when we learn about repressive governments anywhere in the world, that deny freedoms or practice various cruelties on their citizens, we disapprove, and we do not shirk from saying so publicly. It doesn’t matter if those governments claim to be allies with our government. Millions of us push and prod our elected representatives to use their persuasive powers to move such allies towards greater freedoms and failing that, to end the alliances.
It’s important that others know that our opposition to repressive governments does not extend to the citizens of those countries except in the rarest of cases, such as Germany and Japan in World War 2. The struggle for freedom and opportunity in countries across the globe is viewed by many Americans as our struggle too.
In fact, one of our greatest struggles was a 44-year effort that tried to contain the spread of Soviet Communism. Most of us were convinced it was a brutal and repressive system that hurt most citizens where it was tried. Eventually, with the help of many allies large and small, we prevailed. But it was our capacity to outperform their self-defeating economic system, combined with military strength, that got the job done. Certainly, the resistance fighters in Afghanistan contributed to the effort. But that was just one piece in a very big puzzle.
Our anti-Communist effort was a trial and error process, and our government leaders miscalculated or made bad choices knowingly along the way. Sometimes this occurred because our government deliberately hid the facts from us, and we have pushed our leaders to pass legislation that compels them to be less secret as a result.
Not many Americans understood what happened in Iran when Mossadegh was overthrown and the Shah was put in power. By all accounts, our government grossly misjudged the situation, fearing Mossadegh was about to embrace Communism, though that fear seems to have been unfounded. US citizens did not begin to understand the situation for many years, after the coup that toppled the Shah’s government.
However, beginning with the mistakes in Vietnam, ordinary citizens have been more and more active in demanding the facts of our government’s foreign policy decisions, to reduce the number of future mistakes. Perfection in any government is impossible, but we continue to press for reforms that make our leaders more accountable.
I’m aware that there’s great distrust of our government in the Middle East, and in particular, its support of Israel. I intend to address that.
These are the Memorials for those we lost on September 11, 2001
Just as Islam had its Golden Age, and may again, America seems to have entered its own. As a result, our government exerts enormous influence upon international policies that impact the entire globe. This causes concern in many other countries, which is perfectly understandable. There are many US citizens concerned about this as well, because we’ve learned that a skeptical citizenry is a healthy way to limit excesses that can occur with too much power.
Although it can be a slow process, we have learned that change can be made without resorting to violent resistance. But when we consider our national strengths, we view our government to be just one component among several.
I invite you to take a long look at other underlying strengths. For example, consider what our combination of freedoms has permitted, in tandem with our acceptance of people from many lands and cultures into our melting pot.
Rather than dedicate stone memorials and soaring speeches in behalf of those we’ve lost, I offer the lasting achievements of American women and men, because the potential in each of those lost lives was to add something more.
Here’s a partial list of what the US has added to the world:
· Eskil L. Karlson, a Swedish immigrant, patented the first implantable artificial heart in 1974. Invited to South Africa by heart transplant pioneer Dr. Christiaan Barnard, he was appalled by the lack of pure water in its indigenous populations. He invented and patented many ozone treatment system improvements, eventually inventing a self-sterilizing, pyrogen-free water system for the underprivileged in Africa, Southeast Asia and India.
· Kavita Shukla, born in Germany to Indian parents, discovered the herb fenugreek fought bacterial growth and patented a food wrapping paper treated with the herb that preserves food 4 to 6 weeks longer than traditional wrappers. That came after her first invention for a lab safety device that she patented at age 13.
· In 1932 Lloyd Hall, a chemist whose grandmother escaped slavery via the Underground Railroad, used a combination of sodium chloride with tiny crystals of sodium nitrate and nitrite to suppress the nitrogen that spoiled food. His patented method of curing meats is still used today. Then he developed antioxidants, including lecithin, which stopped foods' fats and oils from spoiling, as well as other food preservation techniques.
· George Washington Carver, who was born a slave, developed crop rotation methods utilizing legumes that add nitrogen to soil, and other organic practices, such as plowing under compost, that yielded as much as a hundred times the soils previous productivity. To make the legumes profitable as well, he invented hundreds of uses for them, including 325 uses for peanuts alone, from cooking oil to printer’s ink.
· Frederick Jones, another African American, created the first truck refrigeration units that kept transported foods from spoiling. He also invented the first system that allowed movie projectors to play back recorded sound, making talking pictures possible.
· Clarence Birdseye developed the method of flash freezing foods, and his company tested and began manufacturing refrigerated display cases, revolutionizing the food industry so nutrients and taste were preserved.
· Well before all of these, Cyrus McCormick’s invention of the mechanical reaper, increased the productive capacity of farmers more than tenfold. It not only revolutionized farming, but freed many to work in other industries, helping to usher in the Industrial Age.
Because of folks like these, safe food and water could be provided to the world in larger amounts, with less labor. The world, and the US economy, reaped the benefits. |
