Letter from America #1: Introduction
In the past I’ve written about the hypocrisy of the non-smoking mandate, the artificiality of smiles, and the social armor people don in the name of creativity. Well, there’s only so much to be said of such things. It occurred to me that with a little more effort something could be pursued regarding my homeland, or what was my homeland and what it is becoming.
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The grass in the neighbor’s yard a hundred feet away is bathed in early morning sunlight. Live oaks and sycamore trees leaved in that spring yellow green that makes them more beautiful than flowers. My own patio is shaded, a slight breeze typically moist here in Central Florida in May. The year is 2015, but for the models of the cars in driveways , this could just as easily be 1995 or 1969 or even 1948.
If I didn’t know better, I could delude myself into musing that things have always been this way, peaceful, stable, unchanging, the kind of America I grew up in. The front lawn of the farm house in Michigan where I swung from trees into piles of leaves and peeled strips of bark from off-white birch trunks, that lawn could be my neighbor’s lawn to a little boy. And if I were conservative, I would think this is just the way things should be, have always been, and therefore will always be. But of course, that’s an oxymoron, “thinking conservatively.” This denies the changing nature of society and the need it has to accommodate social and environmental conditions. It lacks analysis , chooses to ignore the self-destructive momentum governed purely by the pursuit a capital. It couples a distorted view of the very wealthy with the grand, traditional version of anyone can make it to the top in America. Of course, Horace Greeley wastes away in a padded cell, a useless anachronism.
Living in America today is living in a fantasy world, filled with dreams of the past or visions of the future. There is no present. The older generation cannot understand the destructive rioting in Detroit and Newark in the 1960s, the Watts riots in Los Angeles, or the contemporary rioting in Baltimore, Maryland. Their answer is tougher laws, larger prisons, and a stronger police force, this even though the United States already incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country in the world. Analyzing the causes of such riots rests uncomfortably beneath an effective denial system and has no place in the America of their past.
Today’s youth, thankfully, is the wild card upon which our future rests. There is an unspoken coalition between more progressive, educated adults, and youth. Both have a desire for change, the first from necessity, and the second to establish an identity and promote a more livable world. There is a caveat which applies to many progressive adults but to all young people: Members of this coalition must be educated. That is a topic in itself and the subject of my next letter.
Back to my peaceful setting, the question might be, can change take place on a national scale with little notice from millions of citizens? The fact is, that’s the only way large change in America can happen. any overt movement, note Occupy, will be drowned out of the public consciousness by vested interests controlling the media. Maybe that’s why this morning seems so pleasant. I know the across the country a very subtle shift is taking place in the thinking more and more Americans. That’s the way it always happens. will paean to the sixties, who would have thought in 1963 that by the end of the decade the focus a public attention would be on civil rights, women’s rights, an end to military intervention in a monstrous war, and a complete overhaul in the area of sexual freedom. I certainly didn’t. Considering what I know to be the decline a formerly great nation, I’m amazingly optimistic. And that needs some explanation.
