Columnist Pius Kamau, writing in The Denver Post, asked the question that we have heard other people wonder about. Since Jews, Japanese and African Americans all faced the same discrimination in America why haven’t African Americans been able to succeed as well as the first two groups have? Kamau, who is an African American, doesn’t say any more about the Japanese but compares the blacks and Jews. Jews’ religion, education, traditions and culture gave their lives direction to bear hardships. The blacks’ Bible sustained them through slavery’s privations. Jews and blacks have some similarities in their historical narrative; that of despised minorities [the other] in a troubled land…. Black America suffers from apathy and indifference; its inability to learn from its own history and the ways of other groups is puzzling.
He goes on to answer the question that “puzzles” many of us. But unlike Jews, blacks have lost focus of who they are and what they want…. With the ‘freedom’ of the 1960’s and ‘70’s, black attitudes towards culture changed, minimizing the role of education and instead glorifying sports. Then he listed the three most important “black institutions” as the NBA and NFL, the black church and the prison system.
The solution according to Kamau is: We need a million Bill Cosby’s in every town in America, to preach the great lessons of self-reliance, education, patience, chastity. I personally think that African Americans have heard a lot of “preachin’” for an awfully long time about precisely the sermon topics listed above among others and it’s been pretty ineffective.
Dick Lamm, former governor of Colorado, in an essay in Academic Questions published by the National Association of Scholars wrote Let me offer you, metaphorically two magic wands that have sweeping powers to change society. With one wand you could wipe out all racism and discrimination from the hearts and minds of white America. The other wand you could wave across the ghettos and barrios of America and infuse the inhabitants with Japanese or Jewish values, respect for learning, and ambition. But, alas, you can’t wave both wands. Only one.
I respect the sincerity of both Lamm and Kamau but they are contributing to the problem with their naïveté. Lamm’s offering of a choice of two “solutions” reminded me that our leaders in the United States are always grappling with many problems and are thus challenged with creating many solutions. I have an even better magic wand than Lamm had to offer. How about one magic wand that would solve all of the problems? With one “wave” of shifted consciousness we could have a transformed America. The creation of a new myth for America, a new paradigm, a new worldview, a new narrative, a new story—these are among the ways that “the shift” could be described.
Here’s a shocker. Neither Jews, Japanese or African Americans are “successful” in America. We don’t even know what success is in America. All Americans are pursuing their own version of success and no matter what age, sex, ethnic group, etc. you might want to ask—they will not have found success—which by the way they all define ultimately as “happiness.” Obviously, no person who is unhappy can say that they have been successful. So is happiness un-obtainable in American today? The answer is no.
We can go on as we have been for centuries identifying the “symptoms” of the human condition as “problems” and trying “solution” after “solution.” Pseudo solutions cause the pseudo problems to elaborate and multiply and obscure the real problems and make realistic solutions literally “unthinkable.” We don’t have nearly as many problems as we think we have, so naturally we have too many solutions.
Too many answers obscure the one basic problem. We must address one problem at a time beginning with the most fundamental one. We are living in an illusionary context, a false narrative—we don’t know where we are. And since that false narrative drives human behavior—we cannot change human behavior in the context of the current worldview or narrative. Changing that narrative to one more in alignment with ultimate reality has to be the solution to the only problem in America and we are running out of time to address it.
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References and notes are available for this essay.
For a much more in-depth discussion on Simple Reality, read Simple Reality: The Key to Serenity and Survival, by Roy Charles Henry, published in 2011.
