Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 155
CHAPTER 4
FAMILY
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THE GRAND DESIGN
Much as the cell is the basic unit of a living organism, family is the basic unit of a social
organization. If the cells are healthy and vigorous, the body they form will also be
healthy and vigorous. The more powerful, interlaced, redundant and capable the cells
are, the more successful the organism they form will be. Likewise, America’s strength
and success as a leading nation is based on the quality of the principles and virtues we
display in our lives and pass on to our children at home. Our homes are the cells of
America.
Thus, it is critically important to our national success to be a nation of successful
families. The virtues and mores, as well as the prejudices and fears that we display as
adults, most often came to us in our formative years. The scale of values that we
learned as children become the principles upon which we build our own understandings
of the world as adults. Through an undeniable process of social evolution, each
generation improves upon the teachings of the previous one. My life’s journey toward
becoming an American indeed began in my family, perhaps longer than a thousand
years before I was born.
Casting light from an angle that illuminates the importance of family values to my
identification with America, forced me to trace the origins of these values to their very
beginnings. As I explored the historical and geopolitical origins of the “American
Concept” and weaved my personal experience of the resulting social compact in the first
three chapters of this book, I also must explore the biological and moral origins of why I
became so identified with it. To understand the forces that produce family, I went to
creation itself. I did this with a very broad stroke, but in the process I encountered many
revealing nuances with which most of us will find affinity.
From times immemorial humanity has built the pyramid of progress driven by one
primordial, unrelenting force. This force flows from the mandate, called instinct, that all
living things carry within to have and protect their progeny. It was imprinted at their most
elemental level by still obscure bioelectric processes. The more advanced the life form,
the more sophisticated the instinct becomes. Among humans this basic instinct is
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