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Two recent articles, 1) Can Dual Citizens Be Good Americans? and 2) Whites Account for Under Half of Births in United States, illustrate both how far we’ve come as a mature, liberal democracy, and how we still have a long way to go. (We’re not there yet because we’re still writing articles like these.)

The first article, in the form of a debate among mostly college professors, raises the question of the meaning of citizenship. Does citizenship somehow mean that one “belongs” to, is a citizen of just one country, and if so how then can one have dual citizenship?

The idea that somehow one belongs to this or that country, “my country right or wrong,” and one cannot belong to more than one, is really an unproved assumption. Why is it assumed that citizenship has to be of just one country? The assumption is without basis.

I would assume, quite to the contrary, that single citizenship, a kind of ultimate belonging to a single country, is absurd. Countries are impermanent, arbitrary, represent at best only historical and geographical separations. If there is single citizenship, or ultimate belonging, it has to be not to a single country, but to the human race.

Isn’t this the “citizenship” that counts most of all. For we are all of the exact same species, Homo Sapiens. And in that sense there is only one nation, the nation of the peoples of the earth. Things might have been different if the Neanderthals and other early Homos had survived. But they didn’t.

The wisest of humans have always understood this, and even before modern science has shown it to be true, that nations are at best artificial arrangements that are constantly changing and evolving as we better understand how best to live together. The frontiers between nations are lines that tell us more about the geography of the earth than about the people who live there.

Most people, however, still don’t get it. Most people continue to believe that their country, say France, somehow holds their identity. But they are much more than that identity, much more even than the cheeses of Normandy, the wines of Bordeaux, and the perched villages of Provence, and I love all these things.

When cheese, wine, and village life and such replaces a people’s ties to others, those from the Maghreb, say, or fromWest Africa, that’s when we all, and in this instance the French, have a problem. And in spite of what it may seem at the moment we can bear the loss of our cultural icons to those of Africa, even our jobs to Asia, but we can’t survive the loss of our common humanity.

The movement of peoples over the past hundreds and thousands of years ought to have made it clear that the present division of the world’s surface into 195 plus entities called nations is totally artificial, mostly stemming from haphazard and arbitrary historical events, and is certainly not a basis for determining our identity, nor how we ought to live.

And in fact most of the disputes in today’s world stem from people placing their ultimate belonging to their tribe, even when in most of the nations of the world today that “tribe” is almost impossible to identify. What is the French “tribe”? Or what is the American “tribe.”

You see what I mean. There is nothing there, and if you go back far enough, you’ll uncover only a constant stream of people coming originally from just one source, probably somewhere in Africa.

So to debate the merits, the rightness, or wrongness of dual citizenship is just silly. If people by holding citizenship in more than one country want thereby to retain their own history, keep their connections with the several or more lands and countries that they or their ancestors have come from, or for any other reason, what could be wrong with that?

Nations, and in this instance the United States, should not oblige their citizens to hold single citizenship. Here for once we seem to have done the right thing by allowing dual citizenship, which by the way all of my children, grand children, and wife possess.

But the greatest obligations, the greatest attachments that all of us have should stem from our being, first and foremost, citizens of the world. In fact, let people choose their individual citizenships, as they choose their clothes. Being human, with all that that entails, not being American, is what should get their concentrated attention.

It’s also trivial as in the other article mentioned to make much of Hispanic and non-white births in the U.S. now outnumbering “white” (whatever that means) births. Do I need to say it again. Only of importance is what the people who are born here, or born anywhere else and come here, legally or illegally, do with their lives while they are here.

Nations, if they do have a role to play, ought to be only concerned with how they can help the people who now happen to reside within their arbitrary boundaries become what they are meant to be, that which means, fully human.

And we are getting better at this. For we no longer enslave the Blacks, exclude the Chinese, and hold the original Americans on reservations. And why? Simply because we are finally recognizing, helped greatly by the findings of modern science (not by religion), our common humanity.

“A debate about violent Salafists has erupted in Germany after radical Muslims clashed with supporters of the anti-Islamic Pro NRW party during its recent election campaign. Three young Muslims who took part in a demonstration against the party in Cologne described their pious worldview to SPIEGEL.“

Malik, one of the three young Muslims, says: ”On the Day of Judgment, perhaps the Prophet will ask: ‘Where were you when the name of the Prophet was defiled?’ I don’t want to have to reply: ‘Oh, envoy of Allah, I am one of those who looked the other way.”

You know Malik believes what he says. And you know there’s probably nothing anyone can do to change his belief. And that is Malik’s problem, and ours. To somehow overcome our different beliefs and learn to live together,

Perhaps it is within the realm of possibility that Western nations cease to buy Saudi Arabian oil, and if so, that Malik and his like would suddenly find themselves without the Saudi Arabian funded pseudo independence they now enjoy. Then they would be obliged to accept, or at least peacefully share living space with others of widely differing beliefs.

Isn’t that the sort of thing we’ve been doing since the arrival of the Europeans among the Americans (not Indians) who were already here in 1492, or at least trying to do, just trying to get alone with one another? Well not so much in the beginning did we do this. Our history is replete with our failures in this regard.

Much like the Salafists today, much as Malik and his friends living in a Christian land, Germany, would make Germans followers of Muhammad, Columbus and his sailors, and the priests who accompanied them, and later many others, many of the first settlers of the West, would make Christians of all whom they encountered.

We’re getting better at living together, at living with those holding different beliefs. That’s progress. That still makes us an “exceptional nation.” Perhaps that’s the highest form of liberal democracy there is, or could be, when there are no belief based separations or “red lines” among us.

More and more as the differences come to the surface, which of course they continue to do, we don’t kill one another but we debate our differences, or at least we know we should. And in our debates we defend one’s right to say that the Muhammad cartoons are wrong, and no less do we defend our right to have them published in our news media.

Malik doesn’t yet understand this. Will he ever? Or will he forever go on believing that if he “looks the other way” when the name of the Prophet is defiled, that the Prophet on the Day of Judgement will look right at him and judge him accordingly?

How has religion taken on this importance in one individual’s life? Or in the case of Islam how has one man, Muhammad, not even a God, become much like an all seeing and all knowing God not just for Malik but for billions on the earth?

The answer has to be because it’s just not enough for the billions that life is no more, or no less than the earth’s changing seasons and the sky’s abundance of stars. For those billions it’s not enough that life does allow us a few moments of happiness, of joy even.

If living doesn’t give us much more, doesn’t hold a promise of eternal life, then living itself for too many, perhaps for most of the earth’s 7 billion people, is not tolerable.

Where would you rather be?

With the Salafists at Friday prayers in Yemen?

With President Vladimir V. Putin and Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev watching a Victory Day parade in Moscow on Wednesday, May 9th?

Natalia Kolesnikova/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

If we were to take the “well-being” temperature of the world, where would it fall, what would be the reading? Of Europe nothing positive is being said. In fact, the “well-being” is not there. Mostly there is talk of a break-up of the European Community of some 27 nations, perhaps preceded by an abandonment of the Euro by the 17 who have adopted that currency.

Throughout the continent Implicit and explicit debt obligations are like a brake or anchor on any possible recovery scenarios and European nations are at best just trying to stay afloat, even their shining leader, Germany.

If we turn to the Middle East and look for some sign of the hope that accompanied what is now already last year’s Arab spring we find little evidence of that movement having gone anywhere in any positive direction, of its having taking root and showing promising growth for the future.

The Arab Spring if ever it was is no longer. Only a few tired old autocrats have left the scene while no new leaders, no new and for the first time in these lands, democrats, have risen to replace them, and we have instead mostly authoritarian and sectarian groups fighting among themselves, all still in the grip of the past, still tied to ancient beliefs and rivalries, now, alas, seemingly unable to change and lead their countries into what could be a new and better future for their peoples.

Then there’s Brazil, Russia, India, and China, the so-called BRICs, — these being, along with the United States, the five largest countries in regard to both population and land area taken together.

The “well being temperature” of the BRICS? And do they hold promise for the future of the world. Do they provide hope, make believers of us all? Are they exceptional? Hardly. While showing more growth than Europe and the United States they haven’t begun to show that they can even handle their own enormous problems, let alone be models for the rest of the world.

If you remove Europe, the countries of the Middle East, and the BRIC countries there is left the United States as a possible savior. (OK, perhaps too strong a word, but what the poor world needs.) People do want to come to the United States, in greater numbers than anywhere else. Therefore can’t we say that we must be doing more things right here than others elsewhere?

And in fact there are, among a total population of more than 300 million Americans, some 40 million immigrants! Not as many perhaps as the immigrant population of the rest of the nations of the world combined, but close to it if you also include so-called illegals that are also here among us.

What is it that makes people want to come here? And it has been this way for hundreds of years, and shows no signs of stopping. Whatever it is doesn’t it make us an exception, the fact that so many want to come here? Why do they want to come here?

My answer would be that here, in USA, there are more people, or at least higher percentages of people than elsewhere, who have more freedom to follow their desires. And here, more frequently than anywhere else, there are more people able to realize those desires, fulfill their individual potentials, and, if you like, make their dreams come true.

And, in fact, if the United States is exceptional, doesn’t it have to be because of this, that the American dream, in spite of all the chatter to the contrary, is still alive today after over 500 years of history?

During the first 400 or more years as the land itself became the possession of the new arrivals, (as it never had been, at least in the same way, the possession of the displaced native American population) you could say that it was the richness of the land more than anything else that most of all permitted the realization of that dream.

But you wouldn’t be right, for even during those 400 years, and especially during the 150 or so years since the closing of the frontier, right up until today, more than the riches of the land it has been the freedom of the individual, the freedom to innovate and create, while drawing on a richness of mental reserves, even more than exploiting the land, that has kept the exceptionalism alive.

You might even say that what seemed at one time to the early settlers of the Western lands to be the inexhaustible riches of the land, that these riches have been more than replaced by the freeing of the inventiveness of a people, the latter a truly inexhaustible resource and one that continues to astound.

For we do astound the world with our creations (admittedly not all admirable), with such as our widely respected and heavily attended university system, our technology wonder companies, those like Apple, Google, and Amazon, and so much else, all together doing so much to change and enrich the culture if not of the whole world at least of all those nations whose borders are open and who allow free or nearly free exchanges between peoples to take place.

Now as I say this I know that many of you are thinking about, and would love to point out, all those ways in which we’re not at all exceptional, and that this world of ours may not be as I am implying the best of all possible worlds.

Yes the United States has its ugly side and its critics have a point. Both before and after our coming together as one nation, we have made mistakes, terrible mistakes, making us look not too different than all the freedom deprived, totalitarian regimes of both past and present.

And there has been no lack of people among us to point out our failings. I remember my own reading of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and my encounter therein with just how unexceptional we were in respect to our treatment of so many of our own people, of native Americans, slaves, (and later freed men), striking workers, immigrant groups, “little people” without defenses of their own.

We thus became in some respects in Zinn’s rendering an all too ordinary country, much as Christopher Coloumbus had become an all too ordinary man as we learned of the horrible events that too place in the Caribbean following his first arrival there.

But the critics are not right. Probably not right even about Columbus, who after all did by his ocean voyages make the world one for the very first time since the break-up of Pangaea, a single earth mass, about 200 million years ago.

Again I would ask if we were not truly exceptional why would so many continue to come here? For they do and in spite of the innumerable number of skeletons in our closets, the Trails of tears, the internments of our Asian peoples, the lynchings of our Blacks, in spite of all the probably mostly unrecorded and horrible things we have done while accumulating our exceptional wealth.

What is it about this country that so many of us still admire. More  of course will always need to be said….

What happened that Democratic and Republican members of Congress, especially in the House, where republicans now make up a “severely” conservative majority, are battling among themselves over timid budget proposals to reduce next year’s budget deficit, while doing little or nothing about the total federal debt of some $15 trillion?

Given the size of both debt and deficit you’d think that the representatives of the two parties would work together to substantially reduce projected annual budget deficits averaging nearly two trillion dollars, as well as the total Federal debt representing just over 100% of this year’s GDP.

Well what happened was that our representatives in Congress, no less than their predecessors, are listening more to their hearts than their heads. They would do what they think their constituents’ want, not what their heads tell them would be best, for their constituents and for the country. Perfectly understandable in that their continued presence in the Congress, their reelection to office, will probably be assured not by the heads, but by the hearts of the people in their districts.

What happened, what probably is behind the present budget “battles,” was that President Roosevelt on January 11, 1944, in almost the last year of his life, and within a year and a half of the end of the war, was also listening to his heart. That also, given the suffering and the hardship of the times, was perfectly understandable.

On that day President Roosevelt spoke forcefully and eloquently about a greater meaning and higher purpose in postwar America, other than the questions of war and security that still occupied his citizens’ lives. Perhaps he meant to give the people a final gift, a follow-up to the Social Security Act of ten years earlier, one that would assure even more his own place in history as being not only a war president but a president for all the people, in particular for all those most in need of Federal government largesse, or so it seemed.

The President proposed on that day an economic (as opposed to political) bill or rights. His words would become a part of the national conscience, most people since then probably agreeing that jobs, education, health care and such should be, to some degree, the responsibility of government. In particular, and on each occasion to a greater or lesser degree, what he proposed would be a part of future Democratic Party platforms.

Here is what the President proposed:

1. The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.

2. The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.

3. The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.

4. The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home and abroad.

5. The right of every family to a decent home.

6. The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.

7. The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accidents and unemployment.

8. The right to a good education.”

In one fell swoop the rights of the Founding Fathers became in President Roosevelt’s rendering entitlements, although he didn’t use that word. Jobs, homes, food and clothing, medical care, education, it all became, or would become the Federal government’s responsibility to provide.

But of course, and here’s the rub, unlike the political rights of the Bill of Rights that cost the government little or nothing, the economic rights were clearly going to cost, and as it now seems, more than the country could ever afford.

And who would have to pay the cost other than the tax payers?  China? In the last few years we have been borrowing more and more from China. Our own children? We are leaving on them much of our present debt in the form of future obligations that will one day have to be met by them and their children.

We already know that we can’t pay for all that we have promised. In fact we will probably have to take back some of what I’ll call Roosevelt’s parting gift to the people. And what is even worse, in spite of all that we have done so far, in spite of running up a huge debt to pay for wars and entitlements, we have little to show for it. We are now burdened with high jobless rates, failing inner city public schools, mediocre and often unsatisfactory delivery of health care.

Rights, meaning according to Thomas Jefferson, the freedom of individuals to pursue life, liberty, and property (“the pursuit of happiness”), the freedom to work hard and by one’s work to earn the very things that Roosevelt spoke of as being necessary to one’s well being. These things, that first Roosevelt and then the Democratic and also Republican politicians would make entitlements owed to the people, should have been presented from the beginning as being available only to individuals who were willing to work for them.

And this is the situation we have today. Too many people see themselves as being owed things that should only have been theirs by their having earned them.

And at the present time neither the Democratic nor the Republican members of Congress are going to risk their own positions by taking back the earlier gifts made to their constituents. The real battle now going on in Congress is not over their doing the right thing (that which in any case they are afraid of doing), but over their not being caught doing nothing at all.

Sander van der Leeuw during a Slate Magazine interview is asked: So what is resilience, exactly?

He has this to say, among other things, in reply:

“Any system, whether it’s the financial system, the environmental system, or something else, is always subject to all kinds of pressures. If it can withstand those pressures without really changing its behavior, then it’s robust. When a system can’t withstand them anymore but can deal with them by integrating some changes so the pressures fall off and it can keep going, then it’s resilient. If it comes to the point where the only choices are to make fundamental structural changes or to cease existence, then it becomes vulnerable.”

Well, I said to myself, the public schools, that’s a system. What about it, is it robust, resilient, or vulnerable? In answer and at first blush, I would say, well, yes, it’s robust. For in spite of extraordinary and constant pressures, both from within and from without, the system hasn’t really changed in 100 or more years. More kids than ever before may be attending school through high school but the system, all of it, the school buildings, class schedules, classroom sizes, subject matters taught, and all the rest haven’t changed significantly during all those years. Robust it is.

How about resilient? Throughout the 100 years or more there have been constant pressures for change, meaning for school people an endless series of reforms, initiated at one time or the other by one or more of the various players, —the parents, the community, the school administrators, the politicians, and even the teachers and students themselves.

But all these reforms, or attempts at reform, have not so much changed the system as softened or lessened the pressures for change, allowing thereby the system to more or less continue intact. So, yes, also, the system is resilient.

Then we have those moments in the history of our public schools, when loud, well positioned and authoritative voices cry out that unless something is done about the failure of our schools to educate, our country will fail to compete and maintain its now dominant position among the countries of the world.

Although not the first of such moments there was Sputnik, on October 4, 1957, the Soviet launch of the very first artificial satellite in history and representing to the whole world our failure and the Russians success in the space race, implying thereby the failure of our schools, and the success of theirs?

Then in 1983, during the administration of Ronald Reagan, there appeared the “Nation at Risk,” a Reagan commission report that warned of “a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.” And of course this meant that our schools (again?) had failed to educate our young people?

Finally, at this very moment we have the report issued by the Council on Foreign Relations and chaired by former Secretary of State Condie Rice and Joel Klein, a former New York City schools chancellor, warning us that “the education crisis is a national security crisis,” Why? Because too many schools are failing to adequately equip students for the work force, and too many schools have even stopped teaching the sort of basic civics that prepare students for citizenship.

So is the public school system no less “vulnerable” than robust and resilient? And could it be, somehow, all three at the same time? Those voices crying out that our nation is at risk because of the failure of the schools, aren’t they saying that the school system is vulnerable and that unless we make structural and substantial changes to the current system it may very well not survive?

Sander van der Leeuw may very well be on to something. Systems do seem to be robust, resilient, and vulnerable. But he doesn’t seem to recognize or realize that most systems are all three and all three all at once. For couldn’t all systems, including those of you and me, our bodily and mental functions, be characterized in this way? Isn’t it the nature of any system to be robust, resilient, and vulnerable, at least as long as it’s alive?

What we may legitimately argue or differ about may only be which of the three terms at any given point in time would best describe the system in question. When, for example, is the system best described by robustness, resilience or vulnerability. The army is vulnerable, the special forces robust? The U.S. Postal Service, and the public schools both vulnerable? These are the arguments we’re having, at least as long as these systems are alive.

For most of us in our own lives all three terms will apply. We begin our day by being robust, impervious to any blows that will inevitably strike us from the environment. But while we take in stride anything and everything that comes along, and don’t fall down or even way from the blows, we do adapt to the punches, witnessing, as it were, a morning robustness becoming an afternoon resilience. By evening we will see ourselves as being less resilient, a bit vulnerable even, and will return to our home base, deriving charge and new courage from food and drink and the company of friends and family, while awaiting the coming of the night and for sleep to restore us again to morning robustness.

I agree with Roger Cohen when he says in a Times op-ed piece, The False Iran Debate, that it is not now and will never be in Israel’s interest to attack Iran unilaterally, and that the Jeffrey Goldberg led false Iran debate in the Atlantic is only wind, or as Cohen says, “huge gusts of words.”

But I don’t agree with his opinion that, if Iran were ever clearly to pursue the bomb, no longer try to hide its intention to become, as Israel and Pakistan and India before it, a regional nuclear power, that it would obviously be our responsibility, right along with Israel, to stop them by any means.

Would it? Would it ever be our responsibility, let alone in our interests to go to war with Iran over their possessing the bomb? Cohen says it would be and he states categorically that a nuclear determined Iran would “face assault from Israel and the United States together.”

Why is that? Because, he says, neither we nor Israel could “permit such a decisive shift in the Middle East strategic equation.” Again, why not? He doesn’t give us a reason. Other than he seems to know somehow that President Obama had to have meant it when he said, during Netanyahu’s recent Washington visit, that “containment of a nuclear Iran is not an option.”

Didn’t we at an earlier time, in regard to Israel itself, and Pakistan and India, quietly adopt, without a single word of discussion, a policy of containment? War with any one of the three was never a possible action? So why is it now?

I hope he’s just as wrong about our country’s intentions and ultimate action as is Jeffrey Goldberg about Israel’s intention to attack Iran’s nuclear installations unilaterally, in its “own defense.” Containment seems to me now, as in the past, just the right policy, given an Iran fully bent upon and eventually becoming a nuclear power.

Actually in Iran’s case containment should be easy. For Iran, no more than Israel, is crazy enough to risk by whatever action it might take, devastating reprisals that would probably mean the loss of its land and centuries old civilization. Probably not even the Afghans in possession of the bomb would take that risk. In any case if we can “contain” Pakistan, and prior to that, the Soviet Union, Iran is a piece of cake.

Bombs only become risks in the wrong hands. In our world that means in the hands of terrorists, those who, apart from lunatics, are probably the only ones who would ever use them. Iranians are not terrorists, nor are they mad.

Sure we would like to limit the number of countries in possession of the bomb, but mainly because of the increased risk, when more countries are nuclear, of a bomb falling into the wrong hands. In that regard, in respect to one of its nuclear arsenal being unaccounted for, Russia and Pakistan probably represent much greater dangers to us than a nuclear Iran.

On the other hand our attacking Iran would definitely bring on unimaginable suffering and hardship to tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East, including the population of Israel. In addition our attacking Iran would trigger any number of terrorist attacks within Europe and the United States. Also our own attacking forces would suffer the loss of probably hundreds, perhaps thousands of  lives.

Finally, unless at a future date we were willing to permit a renewed effort on the part of Iran to obtain a bomb go unopposed, we would have to remain in Iran as an occupying force just to prevent this from happening. And we’re all too familiar with the failure of similar occupations that have been tried, by us and others, in the recent past.

I’ll leave the final thought to Ari Shavit, who says that the Iranian response to an Israeli attack could very well set Tel Aviv ablaze and kill thousands of Israeli civilians, that which would oblige us to intervene. We would then become the captive of an out of control Israeli-Iranian war, and just after getting out of the Iraqi mud and while trying to exit from the Afghan desert, we would become bogged down by a new and even more costly war with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Does Roger Cohen really think that this is preferable to containment? I can’t believe, certainly don’t want to believe that our President does.