Columnists
Towards a More Perfect Union
by I.J. SINGH
From the day I landed in America almost half a century ago, the American Dream has been my preoccupation, as it is for most immigrants. And the "Melting Pot" has been drummed into my head as its model and goal. I have heard it preached from all kinds of pulpits - political, religious and journalistic.
But when I had been in this culture awhile, I started wondering what the words really meant.
It seems to me that in a melting pot, the units blend irretrievably into each other. The individual identity of each item is lost. It is like the process that makes compounds out of elements, whereby the final product differs radically in its properties from the individual components. In a melting pot, the largest ingredient would always overshadow all the others. This reminds me somewhat of a hostile takeover, not a model of cooperative interaction. I wonder if this is how America is.
North America is a land of immigrants. Each wave of immigrants has added inestimable value to society. That is how the society has retained its progressive spirit and its zeal. When a community becomes absolutely absorbed into the mainstream and no longer has any identifiable feature that it came with, perhaps that is when it starts losing its energy.
Then there are some observers who, in deference to the individual components of society, have proposed a model based on a tossed salad, to capture our contemporary social complexity. But then I see that in such a construct, the items of a salad only rarely interact with each other, and a vigorous tossing may deliver more bruised and injured ingredients. So, that model doesn't excite me either.
Sometimes, I have argued that the complex contemporary North American society is a mosaic. A mosaic catches the eye and retains the attention because of the intricacy of its design, and how the pieces fit with each other. In a mosaic, even the smallest piece has a place, such that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Have you ever wondered how small shards that have little value as individual tiles, can create an enthralling whole with much magic and considerable value to it? A mosaic offers an interactive model.
Better yet, one could think of this complex society as a large multi-instrument orchestra. Notice how even the lowliest cymbal or the triangle has a place. When they speak, even the naturally dominant violins and piano listen. When the mighty and the small talk to each other without drowning the other, the conversation becomes heavenly music. That's how a rich performance is born. An orchestra, when well and wisely led, has an organic presence to it.
A lynch mob is governance by majority rule, but we would all reject it. We have all experienced the suffering when a majority turns tyrannical. As a Sikh, I point to the organized killings of Sikhs in democratic India in the 1980's, and also to the targeting and profiling of Sikhs in the United States following 9/11. A democracy mandates that the rights of even the smallest minority are respected. A mosaic or an orchestra requires that even the smallest bit is not trampled on, but instead allowed its breathing space.
I am a Sikh with origins in India, where Sikhs are a minority and barely two percent of the population. The lot of a small minority is never easy. Of course, there are days when I hear the multi-instrumental orchestra in my soul, and the whole "world's mine oyster". But then, there are times when I've never felt so alone. So I remain particularly sensitive to our place in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multicultural nation, much as I value the existence of the triangle and the cymbal among the dominating presence of the violins and the piano in a large orchestra.
What I see here is discovering, nurturing and celebrating unity in diversity, not violently hammering the many into one. This is how I see the meaning of "E Pluribus Unum" that is our motto, and our way to a more perfect union.
Over five hundred years ago, Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh faith, introduced the concept of "Ik Oankar". He was telling us that to discover unity in the diversity of creation is to experience God.