By Dr Raymond Chamba.
Events of the last couple of days have occupied my life and scenes of battle and conflict across the great fruited plain of the United States made my stomach sick to the core. This is not the America I know, the great people that made and moulded me, the culture that on the supremacy of it’s ideas and ideals captures the collective imagination of the world.
Painful images of a hapless and innocent black man in this latest case George Floyd, dying at the hands of some rogue cop are nothing new. Still i believe in America, much so now than ever. Justifiable outrage should be turned towards long needed reforms in the criminal justice system.
Democracy and freedom are not twin stations of the triumph of the human spirit over the crass basic instincts of a dog eat dog world-as open society is more of a journey. It’s not sustainable to sell civil liberties to the highest bidder. Equality can not be outsourced through extoling its virtues on programming younger nations of this world. It must be lived and enjoyed by all at home and abroad.
No nation, no culture in modern human history has appropriately articulated and lived the case for freedom and liberty than in the construct of the constitutional order that is America. Arising from the original sin of slavery, the bitterness of the Civil War and the world consciousness shaping flames of the Civil Rights Movement, the leadership of the United States on international morality has never been more stellar or clearer.
The hope for a more fair, just and equal world has always sprung eternal from the breast of this most total and sustained true experiment in liberty. It’s time to openly confront the insidious racist institutional underbelly that sees being black or brown as inherently criminal.
The great American nation and culture is redefining and tracing itself back to the better angels of its nature. Committed enemies to the idea of justice, freedom and equality do no be proud nor celebrate as out of the deep cinders of angst, sorrow and social schisms shall arise a more perfect Union. For too long sustained periods of great economic growth have not been the perfect rising waters that lifts all boats. Inequality in America if left festering and unchecked is a clear and present threat to nascent democratic orders everywhere.
America is the shining city on the hill that draws all close to it’s physical and idealistic shores. From this chaos, I choose to see great hope and renewal. Trust the American people to get it right. God is not sleeping nor allowing accountability for injustice to slip away.
America, for me has never been a mere geophysical expression with attendant sovereign powers and legitimacy- but more than anything else an ideal, a yearning to be free, a celebration of individual freedom, a reverence to justice, an unwavering commitment to equality, indeed a state of mind and ultimately an attitude. It’s an open ideation to the common cause of the “self-evident truths that all people are created equal”.
Though many times in practice falling short of this humane glory of peace in our time and good-will to all mankind, there is never any nation that is a multiverse of talents, ethnicities, faiths, gender and personal choices is more clearer in terms of its commitment to the defence, sustainance and celebration of personal liberties than the US. Iam an American, and not by citizenship but by my celebration of freedom, justice and equality. All lovers of freedom and equality are therefore American.
In these rough times of national crisis and soul searching we send light, prayers and hope that all shall be well by the great American nation and government in rising up to the challenge to self-introspect and renew into the beacon of hope that we admire and extol it as.
There is no better a society capable of doing this than America. It has done it many times before and this time it should and will be no different as the failure to accomplish the same is too ghastly to contemplate for global democracy.
The world stands rapt with attention at the great struggle unfolding, and let freedom ring afresh and renewed from the Shenandoah Valley to shores of San Diego, from Seattle to Daytona Beach, South Central to Kennebunkport. The glorious journey to sustainable, inclusive growth, development and peace in our time has reached the cross roads. This ideal cannot get choke-held nor knee asphyxiated on the streets of the United States. The freedom train must move on.
We stand with America at it’s hour of need as the global ideal of individual liberties, justice and freedom rises and falls on the success and vibrancy of its storied great and continuing experiment towards the same.
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