COMING TO TERMS WITH THE ROOTS OF AMERICA

COMING TO TERMS WITH THE ROOTS OF AMERICA
Feel free to place your response on Moin's blog.........http://greenviewsusa.blogspot.com/

America is great, not because of Cruise Missiles, but because of the greatest library system in the history of mankind, the Library of Congress and its tributaries. The USA is powerful not because of our 15 well armed and well trained divisions of soldiers, but because of the millions of books available in bookstores all over our land.

Our defences are impregrnable not because of NRA guns, but because we are literate and have the ability to discern right from wrong. Traditionally we have had the moral authority, becuase we have defended the right cuases. Fantasies based on the origins of the country are folklore of almost every nation. What befuddles most intellectuals is that the most powerful nation on earth with access to the best research on the planet and, still worship some of the made up "fairy tales" as if they were the incarnation of God, and the ideas have been delivered to humanity from some divine parchment.

Serious criticism of the constitution and it faults have been pushed under the rug. The elimination of the Native Americans, the disenfranchisement of women, the subjugation of slaves and other serious issues are overshadowed by the Lewis and Clark expedition and the Lousiana purchase. Minority cultures and contirbutions are latent. Black contributions and Chinese labor is still not recognized as valuable to this land. There is almost no discussion of the fact that our constitution and our republic is and synthesis of diverse cultures--Christian, Jewish, Islamic, "Native American" and others.

Over the past 25 years, I have been amazed at the lack of critical discourse about the founding fathers, and our history.

As Lawrence Gladstone eloquently discuss the constitution, she only discusses the racial aspect of our shortcomings. It is a fact that our Senate and our Congress were loosely based on the "Indian Confederation" which gave equal rights to each tribe. A through discussion of the formation of our values, our bill or rights and our constitution can be found in the writings of John Locke, Ibn Haytam, Ibn Tufail, and the Magna Carta which after all was derived from the Shairiah Laws in vogue in Muslim Spain. Where else would people have the insight to have a head of state that was removable? As John Maksudi eloquently describes it, British common Law is based on The Judeo-Christian-Islamic jurisprudence that has it's origins in the Halakah and the Shariah.

Inclusiveness is part of our strength. We must include the demonized communities into our Stars and Stripes, and we must include the disenfranchised and the poor into our sweet land of liberty. While facing the challenges of 911 we fell into the trap of listening to bigots and those who had an agenda against certain peoples. It is amazing that the 911 commission did not include one Muslim in its authorship! If the report is flawed, or we were unable to hear the chorus of voices around the world, in the error of our ways in Iraq, all we needed to do was to raise the decibel level of some of our best citizens on the planet. All the 911 commission had to do was to open a few pages from the writings of a Muslim American--an American that has been an ambassador and an advisor to President Nixon

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://web.mit.edu/mitmsa/www/NewSite/libstuff/Crane/crane.gif&imgrefurl=http://web.mit.edu/mitmsa/www/NewSite/libstuff/Crane/cover.htm&h=145&w=150&sz=14&tbnid=w_0scQRCMlsJ:&tbnh=87&tbnw=90&hl=en&start=6&prev=/images

As Benjamin Franklin said, "we can all hang together or we can hang separately."  Until and unless America can begin to understand the true origins of our constitution and until and unless we stop doling out fairy tales to our population about our constitutional beginnings, we will be unable to gain our true potential.

The White Washing of American History

by Lawrence Goldstone


Conventionalwisdom in publishing these days holds that, in order to be commercial,any book on the founding of the United States has to be "a story oftriumph," an 18th century "Seabiscuit." Muddying the picture bysuggesting, for example, that slavery had a lot more to do with theforging of the Constitution than is generally assumed creates a storyof failure. Failure does not sell. Americans certainly have been treated to a number of rosy portrayals ofthe framers in recent years, although they follow two distinct andoften opposing streams. First and most obvious is what academicsdismissively refer to — generally in a sentence with "McCullough" in it— as popular history. Popularizing, it is said, stresses portraitureinstead of analysis and presents a superficial, distorted, uncriticaland usually Pollyannaish view of forces and events. But the secondtype, in which academic historians tend to overpower human history withtheory and detail, yields distortions of its own and leads to adifferent and perhaps more insidious sort of superficiality.  Insome of the most intellectually penetrating contemporary studies of themaking of the Constitution, for example, even preeminent scholars suchas Jack Rakove and Bernard Bailyn have chosen to focus on the clash ofpolitical ideologies rather than compromises spurred by base economicself-interest. Although their analyses are often superb, by ignoringpractical realities and human frailty, the United States can appear tobe a nation of citizen-philosophers standing around village greens intricorn hats discussing John Locke, as much a caricature as updatingParson Weems. Sanitizing American history in this fashion inevitably de-emphasizesdisagreeable topics, especially the most disagreeable of all, slavery.Although a number of contemporary works have cast a fresh eye onWashington's or Jefferson's attitudes and opinions with respect toslaves, most historians still seem unwilling to face the overwhelminginfluence that slavery exerted, both directly and indirectly, on ourmost sacred national institutions. Dealing with slavery merely as partof an overall theoretic analysis distances the people from theinstitution, consigning slavery to the periphery, an anachronisticquirk.  Butslavery was no quirk, nor was it simply a peculiarity of the times,accommodated by the North for the sake of union. It was rather one ofthe fundamental determinants of American life. For the rice growers ofSouth Carolina and the tobacco planters of Virginia, slavery shapedtheir politics, their economies and, most important, their view ofthemselves, while in the North, the institution provided immense profitopportunities that shippers and merchants exploited ceaselessly.  Nordid slavery exist in shadow. Slavery was as unpleasant and repugnant atopic in 1787, as much a stain on American honor, as it is inretrospect today.  Inthe debates in the Constitutional Convention, more than one Northernerlamented the conditions under which "wretched Africans" lived and died,but they chose to suppress their distaste for tactical advantage. WhenGouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania and Rufus King of Massachusettsdelivered long, lacerating speeches denouncing slavery, begging theirfellow delegates not to encourage perpetuation of the slave trade byincluding three-fifths of the slaves in apportionment calculations,their Northern colleagues overwhelmingly voted them down.Certainly it is more comfortable to read accounts that deify theframers, but deification is dangerous, particularly now. Our nation iscurrently engaged in an unabashed campaign to instruct people aroundthe world on how to live. We sent the citizens of Iraq off to write aconstitution, and then tried to tell them what it should say. If we aregoing to dictate to others what their constitutional process should be,then we should be willing to look a little more honestly at our own. Thisreappraisal ought not be confined to government or academia but shouldinclude the ultimate rulers of the United States — average citizens. Ifwe as a nation fail to appreciate the torturous and tortuous process offorming a Constitution, we will continually blunder when trying todemand that other countries do it our way.  TheAmericans who drafted the Constitution were fully formed human beings,with aims both petty and grandiose. They could be alternatelysophisticated or naive, manipulative or gullible. The legacy theybequeathed us was one of struggle against their own prejudices,self-interest, greed and shortsightedness in pursuit of freedom andself-rule. Ultimately, through war, rancor and bitterness, and in whatwould certainly have been a surprise to many of those very framers,their highest visions were realized. That is triumph enough for me. Lawrence Goldstone is the author, most recently, of "Dark Bargain: Slavery, Profits and the Struggle for the Constitution" (Walker, October 2005).© Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times


Best Regards,

Moin Ansari
973-463-1260 day
973-568-9330 cell
973-568-9330 home
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The information in this email is confidential and may be legally privileged. It is intended solely for the addressee. Access to this email by anyone else is unauthorized. If you are not the intended
recipient, any disclosure, copying, distribution or any action taken or omitted to be taken in reliance on it, is prohibited and may be unlawful. If you are not the recipient of this e-mail,  please immediately delete\destroy it.

Clients: Any opinions or advice contained in this email  are subject to the terms and conditions expressed in the governing client agreement letter.