The History of the United States
I just finished listening to a Great Courses Lecture Series on American History. Over 48 hours of listening content aside, it meant I have been wondering and trying to piece together the deeper veins running through our history and why they are still relevant today.
Why is a leader still able to rouse such high levels of divisiveness around certain issues? Like immigration? I truly wanted to understand it.
I am no political analyst. I am no historian. But even I know that immigration is an old wound. A scar tissue. A festering topic that never really leaves the American psyche.
River Valley Civilizations to Digital Valley Civilizations
The strain of every bigoted immigration movement seems rooted in ‘Go-back-to-where-you-came-from’. This is an interesting perspective. Because if we go far back enough, that would mean all of humanity would still be clustering around the river valleys and deltas practicing agriculture with the annual flooding cycles.
The Egyptians eyeing the invading Greek with suspicion.
But here is the thing. We moved past that. We are no longer river-valley civilizations. We took to the open oceans. We found every nook and corner of land available for us to live on. We are now living in or moving towards digital valley civilizations.
We do not cluster around the primary vocation of those times – growing food. We cluster around the primary vocation of these times. Which is to earn livelihoods in increasingly complex domains using increasingly complex technologies. The prosperous have always attracted people from outside – whether as conquering hordes, or as people who simply were welcomed and came in to be assimilated.
So what seems to be the antidote?
Given this, two aspects occur to me.
- Enable prosperity so high and peace so high in other parts of the world too, so that the immigrants who are flocking to America do not flock to America alone. This is harder, yes, but also the best path forward. It is what happened with the rise of the computer industry in countries like India and China. #EnableProsperity #EnablePeace.
- Immigrant workers have usually (willingly or otherwise) answered a call from America itself when human-power was limited. The Golden Triangle all those centuries ago, meant that America sought slave-labor from Africa and forcibly bought them to the United States to help with their cash crops and raising their families. When the railways needed building, America sought to bring in Chinese workers to do the work. When technical jobs needed doing, America legislated to have tech workers come in.
So, the solution seems to be to raise the skillsets of what we need in our next generation. Prioritize science education, encourage research. Not the opposite. #EnableScience #EnableResearch
America took its time getting here to be the melting pot of civilizations. It has always dealt with changing demographics, but has also proved to be be best model for assimilation in the world. So why this turbulence?
What do you think? What are some of the solutions you can think of?
Nourish-n-Cherish 