Becoming Over Being. Becoming Over Being. Om! (repeat)

America's Mantra (with obeisance): Becoming Over Being. Becoming Over Being. Becoming Over Being. Om!

This is the American shibboleth that proscribes the reality of here and now as never sufficient unto itself. Always the future; seldom the present, never ever,right now. And accordingly we invariably equate our becoming to the elixer, the grail, the greener-grass promise of growth. Perpetual growth, as in the state of forever growing but never being quite being grown(up?).

Other cultures, it is true, predicate the future in terms suggestive of our idea of growth but we seem to have a lot more invested in the very essence of growth. Wall Street and it's coterie of talking heads use the word as a verb, a noun, an adjective, almost as benediction. As does official Washington. No president would consider a State of the Union address without growth this, growth that and then more of the same. Nor should we expect any absence of this utterance to go unnoticed. Markets would surely crash, panic and woe would abound; we'd have an unknown future to behold without the soothing balm of growth.

Maybe it's in our genes; our very RNA as Americans. A look at the past reminds one why 'Go West Young Man', Eminent Domain and 'Westward Ho'! are so us. Always a new place to go if the old place grows stale or the soil goes sour or if the sheriff proves troublesome without realizing a pathology, perhaps fugue, is manifesting itself. These frontier behaviors of ours may well be ancestor to our contemporary mania for unlimited growth and our low esteem for present reality.

Other, older, more settled cultures don't exhibit this pathology, but instead have a provincial predisposition to be suspicious of all beyond the shire or county of residence. In fact, in our insistence on modernity and progress we unwittingly reveal our own nature as "provincials" in that we also fail to look beyond the moment. The great bastion of our provincialism is our Mecca, the Big Apple, Gotham,a.k.a. New York City. Its minions regard the five boros as the known world and Manhattan Island from the Nineties to the Battery as the shining City on the Hill. "Beyond this place, there be dragons!".

Unfortunately, our homely provincialism casts a worldwide shadow. Cloistered in their towers monkish growth mongers in finance and academe cobble-together and promulgate a world that is always in the act of becoming and never just is. Sort of ironic that United Nations Headquarters was established in such a village.
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Unlimited growth makes perfect sense if you are a metastasizing cancer cell but not for a viable nation. ibid