I might bring this up informally with Oversight Committee, like I did with my "Gun Club" Stetson. "Is this OK?"
By "this" I mean my tendency to refer to nations in the past tense, as a matter of plain speaking, of telling the truth. I know they're currently still fervently believed in by many people: nationalism is a global religion, with many adherents.
However, as a New England Transcendentalist of sorts, influenced by Bucky Fuller, I've come to see supranational entities as running the show. This nation-state stuff is shallow theater. I don't usually say "deep state" for that reason.
I've already broken with the mainstream in declaring that I have no nuclear weapons and no plans to acquire them. That sounds obvious but then people often say "we" meaning "we the citizens of a superpower who possess such and such". As a Quaker, I don't want to use my "we" in that way and would rather conscientiously object.
Nuclear weapons, in my estimation, belong to a supranational Grunch of Giants that then tries to puppet the nation-states into maybe using them. Think of a Punch and Judy show.
The point of consistency I want to establish is around my pledge of allegiance to the flag and to the country for which it stands. Giving a once proud nation a decent burial, rather than ghoulishly trucking its corpse around, pretending Uncle Sam is still alive, seems an act of loyalty.
Not that I'm equipped to offer the official last rites. July 4th could become a kind of commemoration.
What I'm protecting is the USA's reputation, in the wake of subsequent highly illegal acts, most recently a gratuitous bombing of random targets in Syria.
That military-mercenary campaign was undertaken as a high profile "presidential" act, in order to legitimize ongoing Grunch campaigns and symbolize the shocking and awesome power of some exceptional nation, God's gift some tell us.
I'm showing allegiance by saying "this isn't the USA at all, behaving like a monster, as the USA died awhile back, RIP".
No one really cares if some individual Friend wears a Gun Club Stetson and thinks of nation-states in the past tense (the better to use a Dymaxion Projection).
I just want to state for the record that I do not consider myself to be betraying the United States, the Union, in honoring it for its noble rhetoric and values, its bold spread across North America, its Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. Great stuff!
Even from the perspective of Mark Twain's day, one could predict the moral arc, under president McKinley, then Teddy Roosevelt. The USA would eventually succumb to the temptation of becoming an oppressive empire, with colonies, on the model of the UK of old.
Imperialism was in the DNA, as Manifest Destiny, later bolstered by Social Darwinism (the flip side of Marxism). By the time I was born, the US was already pretty far gone, given the progress of this illness. The imperial presidency had become much more of a tyranny, insisting on more adventures in conquest versus actually governing an already ample-sized territory.
However, the particular story of the USA, with all its twists and turns, need not take on the entire burden of explaining one of the consequences of "future shock" (a term coined by Alvin Toffler) i.e. the evaporation of the nation-state political data layer.
The swift integration of planetary infrastructure, and the realistic need to "think globally" as a matter of doing competent engineering, made the shallow theater of nation-states increasingly less possible to believe in.
Many people certainly wanted to suspend their disbelief, and many still could. For others, it became psychologically impossible to go along with all the make believe, perhaps as a result of religious training.
As an early adopter of the post nation-state mindset, I'm perhaps helping other Friends find a way forward, as the spirit moves them.
I'm not proclaiming a dystopian outcome either. Spaceship Earth (the Global U) is what we make of it. Thy Kingdom Come.
