Vibrant Threshold, 3rd of the Dog Days,  526 M.E. (Helios): Happy Interdependence Day, for those of you on that other calendar.

Interdependence (pratītya samutpāda) means that nothing exists independently, everything is connected to the vast web of causes, conditions, and relationships. Realizing this interconnection dissolves the illusion of a separate ego-self and gives rise to profound compassion. 

Whatever it is that you call "you" - your memories, attitudes, personality, preferences, dislikes, and so on - are all dependent on past experience, and those past experiences were all caused by the presence and actions of others. Your memories, attitudes, etc. are interwoven with those of others - no person is an island. 

The web stretches infinitely across the universe. The memories, attitudes, etc. of others are dependent on still others, and so on and so on across all of space and time. If one gets past that sense of ego-self, "you" are the entire web and the entire web is "you." You are all men and women, dogs and cats, your fellow nationals as well as foreigners. You are refugees and immigrants, the homeless and the well-heeled, both the Palestinians and Israelites, the Russians and Ukrainians. You are sea urchins on the ocean floor and stars in the sky. You are space and time.

The United Snakes is not independent of the United Kingdom. The English gave us our language, our understanding of law, and the King James Bible, which still has a lot of influence on a lot of minds to this day. They gave us slavery, shipping hundreds of thousands of captured Africans to these North American shores with the intention to helping the colonies prosper so that Britain could compete with the other European powers. The Portuguese shipped many more slaves to Brazil for largely the same reason, but that's another story.

I don't blame the American colonists for slavery. The institution began some 150 years and many generations before the American Revolution. I blame the English, and I'm angry with the northern colonies that recognized the immorality of slavery but still allowed the slave-holding colonies to enter their union.    

I understand strength in numbers, but the new nation didn't have to be 13 colonies. The eight New England and Mid-Atlantic colonies could have seceded without Georgia, Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, and formed a "more-perfect union" without those slave-holding states. Those colonies could have formed their own union, which they eventually did anyway as the Confederacy.

You might say that two competing nations on the same continent would likely have resulted in war, but that happened anyway, didn't it? You might say that including the slave states in the Union would have encouraged them to abandon slavery, but that didn't happen for some four score and seven years. If there were an abolitionist United States in the north and a slave-holding Confederate States in the south, slavery would have eventually ended, just like it did in Brazil and everywhere else in the civilized world. Post-slavery, the two nations would likely have eventually merged during the Great Expansion. But no, the Yankee cotton mills on the Merrimack and Hudson Rivers wanted their cheap cotton, and were willing to overlook their moral and spiritual objections to slavery in order to keep the Southern colonies and their cotton-picking farms in their new nation.

Shame of John and Sam Adams and John Hancock for overlooking their morals and including slave states in the new nation. Fuck Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton and John Jay for getting in bed with slave-owners and traders.   

Well, that took a turn, didn't it? I started off all peace-and-love and empathy, we're all one, and so on, and wound up at "fuck Benjamin Franklin." 

Must be the heat.