Traveling to a New America

By James Hilgendorf

Author, speaker, poet, and filmmaker James Hilgendorf draws upon his own books, poems, blogs, and articles, to create a pastiche of a new America - one that even now, amid all the division, anger, and loss of hope we are experiencing in our country, is struggling to be born.

A song of immense new beginnings, of a deep seismic shift in the way we view our own individual identity and potential, and the potential of these fifty States.

Past, present, and future - voices calling forth the real dream of America - something deeper even than heretofore imagined.

The dream of America is the dream of the universe itself, coming to fruition and bloom.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Hilgendorf
• Release date: Apr 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370070879

James Hilgendorf

James Hilgendorf is the author of nine books - "Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective", "The Great New Emerging Civilization", "The New Superpower", "The Buddha and the Dream of America", "A New Myth for America", "Poems of Death: Time for Eternity", "Handbook for Youth in a Muddied Age", "Maybe We Need a New Religion", and "Forever Here". He is also the producer of The Tribute Series, a series of highly-acclaimed travel films that are in homes, libraries, and schools all across the United States, several of which have appeared on PBs and international television.

Book preview

Chapter 1 - A Note About This Book

This book is a compilation of selected pieces from my prior ten books, as well as blogs that I have written over the last few years; of poems; articles about great, though sometimes not so well known, heroes and heroines of our American past; and comments and reflections about America from a few of the many ordinary men and women I met and interviewed randomly on the streets in different towns and cities while Traveling to a New America.

Amid all the division, chaos and anger we see around us in America and the world today, I feel we are living in a time of immense new beginnings, of a deep seismic shift in the way we view our own individual identity and potential, and the potential of these fifty States.

These selected pieces from my own writings, along with the personal stories of others, past and present, are meant to give voice and presence to the dream that is struggling to be born here in America.

America as it is, and could be, and is becoming.

*****

America is the Promise of the Self

America is the promise of the self.

It is the unfolding, finally, of everything that was imagined or dreamed.

It is finding the very core of the universe, and all the gods and demons and stars and suns and galaxies, within one's very own heart.

Look into the mirror. Who is there?

Ultra powerful reflector telescopes gather upon smooth polished mirrors ever and ever deeper glimpses into the life of a universe beyond comprehension, gazing back billions of light years into the past. We look into those mirrors, but fail to see ourselves. These images are our own life.

Everything swings on this moment, all time and all space.

America is here and now. There are no fantasy lands here.

Rocks and country roads, skyscrapers, rivers, flowers and fields, they are all right here. We live on this Earth, nowhere else.

All those who have died, from the beginning of time, crowd in upon this land, this America, hovering among the shadows in anticipation, for a word of what is coming, of what is to be revealed.

America is something never before imagined.

*****

The Animals Are Waiting

The animals have been waiting.

The birds, the leopards, dogs, bees and seagulls, the elephants dancing in elephantine circles, hooting with their trunks – at long last!

America!

*****

Hubert Harrison

Chances are you have never heard of someone named Hubert Harrison. Until this past few months, I know I never had.

I'd like to introduce you to a truly remarkable person in our own American history.

I came across him in a strange way. Somehow I clicked onto a page on Google that was about a black man named Hubert Harrison, who was giving lectures and selling books on the street corners in Harlem during the First World War – lectures on science, women's suffrage, evolution, religious superstitions, politics, class and race consciousness, and other topics which would draw crowds of hundreds of people.

I thought to myself: Who is this man?

Another thing that peaked my interest was a quote from Henry Miller, the great American author of Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn and other books, and an early literary idol of mine, who as a young man recalled Harrison as one of his own idols. Miller wrote:

There was no one in those days who could hold a candle to Hubert Harrison. With a few well-directed words he had the ability to demolish any opponent. I described the wonderful way he smiled, his easy assurance, the great sculptured head which he carried on his shoulders like a lion. I wondered aloud if he had not come from royal blood, if he had not been the descendant of some great African monarch. Yes, he was a man who electrified one by his mere presence. Besides him, the other speakers, the white ones, looked like pygmies, not only physically but culturally, spiritually. Some of them, like the ones who were paid to foment trouble, carried on like epileptics, always wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, to be sure. Hubert Harrison, on the other hand, no matter what the provocation, always retained his self-possession, his dignity.

I discovered a superb biography, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918, by Jeffrey B. Perry; absorbed it in a few days, and was quite astounded by this heretofore unknown person Hubert Harrison that I had run across.

Harrison was born on St. Croix, Danish West Indies in 1883. His mother was a working-class woman, and his biological father was a slave. Growing up in poverty on the island, Harrison learned first-hand the struggles of his race.

In 1900, as a 17-year-old orphan, with nothing but the clothes on his back, he arrived in New York City, and immediately was confronted with the atmosphere of intense racial oppression of African Americans existing in the United States. Harrison was especially horrified and shocked by the lynchings and virulent white supremacy that was then reaching a peak in these years in the South.

Working low-paying service jobs, he attended high school at night, and read and educated himself. Over the ensuing decades, he rose to become one of the most influential people in America. Writer, orator, educator, critic, editor of Negro World, political activist in the Socialist Party, founder of the New Negro Movement, his work had an immense influence not only upon his own time, but upon the times and people that followed.

Author, journalist and historian Joel A. Rogers wrote:

Harrison was not only the foremost Afro-American intellect of his time, but one of America's greatest minds. No one worked more seriously and indefatigably to enlighten his fellow men.

At the core of Harrison's life was an unrelenting devotion to justice. Racism and white supremacy were his targets.

Harrison once wrote:

Politically, the Negro is the touchstone of the modern democratic idea. The presence of the Negro puts our democracy to the proof and reveals the falsity of it...True democracy and equality implies a revolution...startling even to think of.

Through his writing and lectures and social involvement, he labored unrelentingly to educate the masses, and to give voice and dignity to African-American men and women everywhere.

He wrote:

America is a great experiment in democracy...unique in the history of the world...And the great American experiment is to determine for the future whether we can make out of the welter of races and nations one people, one culture, one democracy. It is confessedly a hard task, but it can be done, and the grounds of that faith rest on the known facts of the present and the past.

Of course, he was attacked on many fronts; but his labors became the seedbed of future movements and many great future leaders.

*****

The Miracle Is You

At the heart of the most pressing problem lies the key to turning everything around.

When the problem will not go away, when it stares you unrelentingly in the face, when you think you cannot go on living even unless it changes, this is the turning point.

But the problem will never change if you think something is going to magically happen, if you think the solution will arrive knocking at your door to give you relief, if you are waiting for the miracle to happen.

The miracle is you.

The miracle is summoning up totally new energies from within. It is forging new determinations, and then acting and moving ahead with all your might. It is do or die.

The miracle is finally believing in yourself. It is depending on no one and no thing. It is making up your mind.

It is calling forth infinite resources where you saw no resources.

The universe is waiting for you. The universe has given you this problem as a gift. The universe will bend to your every whim, but only when you yourself move with implacable will and determination.

It all depends on you.

You are the turning point of a miracle.

*****

Arnaldo

Fremont, California

This is not the old white America of trim lawns and white-washed picket fences. White America numbers only about a third of the population here. Half of the population of this city of around 230,000, just north of San Jose, is Asian by roots – Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, Pakistani, Japanese, Burmese, with the largest population of Afghan Americans also in the United States.

While here, I met Arnaldo and his two children.

Arnaldo is originally from Arequipa, Peru, the second largest city in Peru. He came to the United States seven years ago, and is a United States citizen.

We talked