Benjamin Franklin: His presence on the U.S. $100 bill reflects his
importance as a champion of the individual as the basis of a well-
functioning society.
The Centrality of
the Individual: Benjamin Franklin's Message for Uruguay (El Pais,
Uruguay)
"Between
cocaine paste and marijuana, absorbed in the debate about ways of counting
homicides, faced with a deterioration of the issues and debate, are we in
Uruguay are doomed to missing the core message of a universal colossus like Franklin?
... Determined to lay the blame on wider society and the enemy class, how are
we to realize that even the hundred dollar bill teaches us that the foundation
of everything is the person?"
Uruguay President Jose Mujica: Known as the poorest head of state in the world, Mujica lives on a ramshackle farm and gives away most of his salary to charity.
After many years, I have returned to the United States. In
the capital of Georgia, I am again impressed by all that works well.
Not so much in the big numbers, though, with the country threatened by foreign debt,
the European crisis and competition from China.
At a human level, I am thrilled by what is working, from
cleanliness to services.
Beyond a framework which is always easy to criticize, the
dream of integration is still alive, running as it has from Uncle Tom's Cabin
to the martyrdoms of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. It is alive and
made real through the equality of the educated, who work with enthusiasm and
walk with smiling faces rather than accusers with resentful sneers or the absent
gaze of those who've already surrendered. People continue to admire the winner
instead of treating him with suspicion and grumbling. These are people who
acknowledge the other without looking toward his origins, respecting his
talents, virtues, and applauding his triumph. Good people.
Of course, not everything is better. More than a decade after
9/11, security forces still react with obsessive searches that stretch one's
patience to the limit and border on indignity.
The people of the United States owe this misfortune to the
fundamentalism of certain Muslim groups. Let us hope that, despite tensions
that this kind of fundamentalism is sowing in the Middle East, security here
will again come to depend more on confidence than on subjecting every last soul
boarding an aircraft to X-ray examinations.
After all, the United States owes its existence to utopias -
great flights of imagination and thinking. This is an ideal, and to affirm it is neither to be utopian, nor
ignorant about the things that gave rise to it.
To forget the principal and not fight for it would be to
silently surrender aspects of freedom and a lifestyle that should not be lost to
the mists of time. We all should preserve them for the future.
This is something not taught under the materialist and
determinist theories denounced and pummeled by Pitirim Alexandrovitch Sorokin
60 years ago, but which still prevail in the educational systems of countries
like ours.
[Pitirim Alexandrovitch Sorokin was an ardent opponent of
communism, and emigrated from Russia to the United States in 1923, at age 33].
But if history
is seen as an effort by visionaries to lead the spirit of the people, it is
clear that despite everything, the dream of the Mayflower has
prevailed. And given that, Benjamin Franklin's hundred dollar bill has become much
more than a symbol of economic power.
If Franklin's
venerable image presides over the $100 bill, it isn't because he invented the
lightning rod, nor because he managed to flourish between the colonial and independence
eras. It is because he defined and embodied a model of a fighting person, going
from thought to action and vice versa following a circular and virtuous quest, in
which duty and work governed and the rule of law emerged out of the human
condition.
Between
cocaine paste and marijuana, absorbed in the debate about ways of counting
homicides, faced with a deterioration of the issues and debate, are we in
Uruguay doomed to missing the core message of a universal colossus like Franklin?
Determined to
lay the blame on wider society and the enemy class, how are we to realize that
even the hundred dollar bill teaches us that the foundation of everything is
the person?
