I read something earlier today, while running down the time I have to accomplish several tasks that need to be sorted, and it is something said many times by many people, often presented as wisdom, or simply academic mumble. It spills from the mouths of the relativists and filters into common parlance: there is nothing culturally specific to any one culture, all cultures are equally good and equally bad, nothing is better only the same.

A poison has infected the body and it is pumped in doses high enough to kill, but for now it is simply stunting our development and growth - we are moving backward quickly, into the abyss even while we believe we are moving forward. That is the funny part about being in an abyss - you don't really know where you are relative to anything else, and especially due to the fact it is all relative.

How do you know your mother loves you? Really loves you, not simply the sort of love we banter about like those blow up balls at a baseball game - real love. How do we know?

I suppose there are some people who would say that you don't - it is all endorphins and chemicals in the body. Very sad for them.

For the rest of us, we do believe. We believe that there is one person for us, one person who drives can drive us mad with happiness, one person who can and will ignite our passion like a super volcano. We believe, perhaps wrongly, but we believe. If there is nothing unique about a culture, then surely there is nothing unique about its people, in which case why choose one person over another if everything is very much the same. And let's be honest - it is not like we will select someone with four arms and six eyes - we are all quite the same with mild variations in our behavior and talents, or lack thereof. We all put our socks on the same way and we all tie our shoes the same way. The vast majority of us are right-handed and have brown eyes and brown hair (statistically). We are not all that unique so why one person and not another - why do we believe, nay, why do we know that there is one person for us? Is it only the simplistic who think this way, or is it perhaps a more pervasive belief?

If our love is unique and the person who can fill our life, is so unique, why is our culture so ... so lacking in specificity. How do we know the person we have fallen in love with is the single person who would and could fill our life? Rationally it is the single greatest flaw in human behavior - to believe such nonsense, yet we do believe it without any logic or science to support us.

Why then is it not possible that we, in the United States, have a culture that is specific, albeit difficult to define - much like why we love one person and not another, and worth preserving.

Can we do anything but love the person? What if it is unrequited love? Does that change how we feel about our beloved or our culture. I would say no. She will always be, regardless of time or distance - just like our culture and our country. It is not easy to define why we love someone, nor is it always easy to explain why we love our country. Like the love we will never forget, she has flaws - a history tainted by much sadness and grief, yet through it all, she stands as a beacon of hope -- very much like the love of your life, wherever they may be.





Degraw

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