The Pilgrim's Dream (really)

America is my home.

I am proud to be an American.

Some day however, I, like so many others before me, may find myself captive or simply captivated by another land or place upon this great earth in further pursuit of becoming a "one-worlder"  -- or perhaps I'll follow my boyhood dream and become an offworlder.

"Choose your weapons (or means) of peaceful capitulation!"

Hamilton-Burr Duel

But not right now.

As of this moment, I remain, quintessentially and to the core, American.

That brings me to the meaning of not just "Thanksgiving," but my take or view of America itself.

Michael Medved writes somewhat perceptively on the subject "Real Pilgrims" (?) this week in USA Today:

"Most children learn that the Mayflower settlers came to the New World to escape persecution and to establish religious freedom. But the early colonists actually pursued purity, not tolerance and sought to build fervent, faith-based utopias, not secular regimes that consigned religion to a secondary role. The distinctive circumstances that allowed these fiery believers of varied denominations to cooperate in the founding of a new nation help to explain America’s contradictory religious traditions – as simultaneously the most devoutly Christian society in the western world, and the country most accommodating to every shade of exotic belief and practice." 

Supporting that with:

"The Pilgrims and their spiritual descendants never had to retreat from religious fervor or Biblical demands to join the new Republic, thanks to the continued existence of more or less autonomous, localized refuges and enclaves. No one can suggest that our Founders embraced secularism or relativism, but they did come to accept the notion of separate faith communities following their own distinctive rules while managing to live side-by-side and to cooperate where necessary . . .  The limitless boundaries and vast empty land of the fresh continent, plus the challenges of a long Revolutionary struggle, gave the faith-filled fanatics of the founding the chance for a freedom more profound than mere religious tolerance: the right, in their own communities, to be left alone."

In other words, he concludes, America is a land where we have earned the right to be "left alone" (in the pursuit of "happiness," no doubt).

That conclusion however rings only partly true today, in my opinion, based upon not only a spiritual side of the law of diminishing returns, but the increasingly blatant realities of global interdependence.

Further, John Whitehead of The Rutherford Institute reminds us in piercingly clear words this week (here) that America and God (and the world) are again at a crossroads, invoking the words of that deceased "pilgrim," and recently oft noted, former Russian exile:

Increasingly, we are headed toward a spiritually dead-end society as our schools and universities, reluctant to teach values, avoid religion as if it were a plague. As a result, in the words of Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "men have forgotten God." He knew of what he spoke. For a short time, Solzhenitsyn was exiled in the United States where he observed Western culture first hand. As a result, Solzhenitsyn tended to reject the Western emphasis on materialism based largely upon his belief in Christian values.

Have we forgotten God?

Perhaps, that can be stated in a way more palatable even for the most agnostic or atheistic, too.

Have we lost that desire of the pilgrim forefathers, that fervor or dream for purity and freedom and along with that; that most basic of all human rights, the right to be "left alone"?

 Flat Earth

Have we reached the end of the earth?

Are the frontiers - even of space - no longer all that appealing or beckoning?

Perhaps, some answers (and questions) really do remain, too often unspoken, within the human soul.

"The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live." ~Victor Hugo

And then you have this:

In the name of God, Amen.
We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord, King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, etc. Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern Parts of Virginia; do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually in the Presence of God and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid; And by Virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the General good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience.

In Witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod the eleventh of November, in the Reign of our Sovereign Lord, King James of England, France and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth. Anno Domini, 1620.

The shores of America have continued to attract (and occasionally repel) pilgrims of all stripes, shapes and agendas.

Shall it remain so?

Cape Cod, where first landfall occurred,  forms a continuous archipelagic region with a thin line of islands stretching toward New York, historically known by naturalists as the Outer Lands.

"East of America, there stands in the open Atlantic the last fragment of an ancient and vanished land. Worn by the breakers and the rains, and disintegrated by the wind, it still stands bold." - Henry Beston.