INTERESTING TIMES

       What makes this country a beacon among nations, what makes America fundamentally what it is, is the principle for which it stands, the idea, both tantalizing and terrifying, that every individual has a destiny and the right to largely be left to his or her own devices to fulfill it. That bedrock American principle is often confronted by the reliable evils of reality, but the principle endures. For all the problems with race and identity, the twin third rails of our contemporary experience, the Declaration of Independence remains the American charter, our philosophical genome, the DNA-book of the national ideal. Better than just a good idea, as a document expressing the value of human worth and aspiration, and making no exceptions in its narrative, at least, for color or national origin, it has no equal in history. That’s our national security.

       What makes these times interesting for the United States is the confluence of natural migration patterns, ethnic aspirations, democratized technology and mass popular culture that are shaping the American future. It was proof of either the genius or the hubris of the Framers that the language of the Declaration of Independence was so all-inclusive. Either way, genius or hubris, we now live in the American era in which those principles, those high-flown ideals that make us U.S. are being put most fully, most dramatically to the test. It’s put up or shut up time for the United States, maybe more now than at any other time in its history. While many of the old stratifications persist, fighting like some pitiful cornered animal to stay alive, America at the dawn of the twenty-first century is, dragged kicking and screaming when necessary, beginning to live out the notion of the storied melting pot.

       In matters of race, ethnicity, gender preference, and religious and political affiliation, a seismic shift is slowly underway in American life. And the foundational document symbolizing this shift may be nothing more visionary than a census form. The rising dominance and impact of the Hispanic population on the mosaic of American life; the increase in interracial marriages; the drive for equality among gay, lesbian and transgendered Americans; and the statistical dilemma of multiracial identification encountered by the Census Bureau in the runup to the 2000 election are indicators of the quiet drama of transformation taking place everywhere in America, family by family, household by household, away from cameras and position papers, hidden from pundits and pollsters and the slam-dunk pronouncements of commentators, taking place in the privacy of the human heart. How America responds to these evolutionary challenges to the cultural hegemonies of its history will define its future.