America: 40 Years of Wandering
CAS Prof Charles Stith compares the last 40 years of American history with the biblical story of wandering in the wilderness
With a population of 300 million, the United States can hardly be considered wilderness, but, in one sense, that’s how Charles Stith, director of BU’s African Presidential Archives and Research Center and a College of Arts and Sciences adjunct professor of international relations, sees America. Stith explains his view — derived from the biblical story of the Hebrews lost in the wilderness after Moses led them out of slavery in Egypt — in a Denver Post guest column on February 3.
Stith reminds us that it has been 40 years since the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59) and Robert F. Kennedy — the length of time the Hebrews were “wandering in the wilderness,” according to biblical tradition. “In these years, the wars we’ve fought are symptomatic of a sort of wandering from the principles that have grounded this country and the American Dream,” he writes in “After 40 Years, Finding a Way Out of the Wilderness.”
Stith feels that there has been an atmosphere “of suspicion and cynicism that has hung over this country like a dark cloud for the last 40 years. As a nation, we seem to have been one step south of finding our way out of the morass. We have been lost in the wilderness.”
This year’s presidential candidates “need to understand that people are not simply calling for ‘change,’ but a chance to move beyond where we are, not just politically and economically but culturally and spiritually as well,” he writes. “People seem to be saying — and I agree — that 40 years in the wilderness is long enough.”
Rebecca McNamara can be reached at ramc@bu.edu.
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