I See America

I can see America. It is a ceaseless striving for something else. From points east in little colonies they came, some for freedom, many for profit; some to start over and some to escape. Their impulses are as diverse as their stories and their names. They spread out following rivers and deer trails in trickles and drips until the tide became a flood sweeping over mountains and plains driving ever west and up out across the land and the seas. They broke the boundaries of clans, tribes, nations, nature, and space to reach out and touch the stars. This is America, the never ending yearning, a restlessness to be ever moving.

I love this place, its land, its people. It is my home. Whereever I go around this globe, I feel the pull of the land on me. I feel my home here in American, the mountains of the West and I am a descendant of all her peoples, the white and the black, the settler and the Indian, the robber-baron and the union-man.

Greed and lust are as American as freedom and cannot easily be separated from her virtues. The same passion that drives America's innovations and technology, drives America's fracturing and atomization. Natural orders come as interconnected systems.

I can see the hate beginning to boil. The divisions that underlie our strength are fractured under stress. It begins as a rumor. One group has betrayed us. One of us is Un-American and it spreads like a flame. They are repeated so many times that the rumors become fact in the popular imagination. The economy worsens and one side turns against the betrayers and drives them out to restore the purity of their system. It convulses and from virtue it forges vice.

If ever we believe that we cannot become like this, then we become at most risk of falling. Pride goeth before the fall.

I see America is all her glory and in all her infamy and I am in love with both. I am full of hope, but I am full, too, of fear for her.