‘Out of one, many’ is the American way
America is a strange animal; it’s both a country of contrasts and a land of homogeny, an ever-evolving palette of social, financial and political contradictions.
E pluribus unum, “out of many, one,” yet aut ex uno plures, “out of one, many.”
As a people, we are as divided as ever, defining ourselves through the black and white of party allegiances, a cable media morass that wedges more than informs, moral issues that come with judgments of immorality, and perceptions and misconceptions of freedoms.
These chasms play out in reactions to the thousands of Central American migrant children and families being distributed throughout the Southwest, to name just one in dozens and possibly hundreds more hot-button issues that keep the collective psyche a split personality.
National health care, Common Core curriculum, the War on Terror and the spread of Democracy. Racial equality, government intrusion, freedom of speech vs. imposing upon someone else’s freedoms and expectations. It’s a lengthy list, light in common ground.
And despite living in a nation where the Civil Rights Act just turned 50 years old, Rowe v. Wade celebrated more than 40 years in biological liberty, and every man, woman and child afforded the opportunity to worship whomever or whatever they want openly, our division also illuminates the growing population of disenfranchised and disengaged Americans inhabiting a middle ground that is fed up, apathetic and having no idea what or who to believe.
Yes, 238 years into the birth of arguably the greatest society ever conceived, we are still figuring out our way, petty children, which I suppose is fitting as the United States is but a junior to the elder statesmen of the organized civilizations of Europe, Asia, Africa and the lower Americas.
Certainly we were a more focused nation — or a precursor to one — in 1776, heading toward revolution and independence, singular in goal and willing to sacrifice by any means necessary to free ourselves from the tyranny of King George.
Still, it’s interesting to see just how much has not changed in this country.
Our deep-seated freedoms and independent streak keeps us from walking lockstep on the issues of the heart, that is, the things controlled by our emotional selves, like family, love, faith and pleasure seeking.
Yet the haves and have-nots present an endemic inequity that has survived the birth of a nation. We’ve added some zeroes and folded in some immigrants into what we consider race and ethnicity today, but our demographics seem surprisingly similar, too.
As of 2007, 1 percent of Americans controlled 35 percent of the nation’s wealth, with the top 20 percent in charge of an alarming 85 percent the country’s total wealth.
And if that wasn’t surprising enough, those numbers inflated following the economic collapse of 2007 and 2008, where a middle class that exploded out of World War II and the 1950s took its most historical hit.
Move back in time circa the 1770s, and the distribution of wealth wasn’t all that different: the top 10 percent of the northern colonials controlled 45 percent of the wealth, while the plantation-rich South saw the 10 percent controlling 75 percent of the wealth, according to Thomas Fleming’s “What America Was Really Like in 1776.”
The biggest difference today is the way the end of slavery and plantation life reversed the seat of wealth. Today, the southern states, from Arizona, New Mexico and Texas in the west, to what we traditionally think of as the Deep South, have 20 percent or more of their populations living in poverty, according to recent Census figures.
Our national identity has shifted, as well, but our base demographics appear relatively stable: what was considered white is different between now and then, yet the distribution is similar.
The 2010 Census placed the non-Hispanic Caucasian population, those claiming some sort of European ancestry, at 72.4 percent, with the rest Latino, black, Asian and various “others.” That is for a nation of 308,745,538.
In 1776, according to Fleming, America’s 2.5 million people were no less statistically diverse for the time, really. While 60 percent of the population was from England, the rest were from Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Scotland, Sweden and Africa, all of whom are now a percentage inhabited by Latinos, African-Americans, Asian-Americans and any and all manner of the world’s huddled masses.
It’s good to remember — not just on Independence Day but every day — that as different as we’ve become, as stratified as we are, there is still much that binds us. Our historical similarities are rooted in revolt that has traded the muskets and violent upheaval against Great Britain for the revolution of the mind and the domestic diversity of ideas, opinions, values, lifestyles. We’re different, but we’re the same: the definition of what it means to be American.
This column first appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, July 4, 2014.