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Kraken
Federated Suns
Marshal
Joined: 04-Feb-2002 00:00
Posts: 2755
Location: United States
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 Posted: 04-Jul-2003 15:35 Post subject: What America Means to Me |
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What America Means to Me
Theodore H. Whyte
?Reader?s Digest,? August, 1976
I am home in New England after many weeks on the campaign trail. From Boston?s
Faneuil Hall, through the hives of Florida?s sun-washed condominiums, to the fashionable
parlors of Manhattan, I have been listening to the men who want to be president. This year
more than ever they perplex me-for there must be some common thread, some common
concern that binds Americans beneath the crackling overgrowth of party politics and clashing
visions.
The only clue to an answer comes through a window as I sit looking down over a valley
in my Connecticut town of Bridgewater. Beyond, a low gray ridge hides the cleft through which
runs the Housatonic River. And beyond rises the hazy blue line of the Berkshires, and beyond
that flows the Hudson. Still farther away lift the unseen Appalachians; and yet farther come the
Great Plains, the Rockies, the tawny slopes that run down to the far edge of California.
I have crisscrossed this America for many years, looking for meaning. But it started here
in New England. When I clear brush, I come across the overgrown stone walls of abandoned
farms. How other men?s backs must have ached as they cleared fields, pulled the stumps, piled
the stones! Then up over the ridge and down into the next valley rolled their wagons, over the
next river, over the next range. On and on for 200 years-questing. Seeking opportunity for
themselves and a promise for their children. They were followed by millions and millions more
from Europe, and are followed today by what is the largest wave of immigrants in our history,
legal and illegal alike, seeking the same opportunities, demanding the same promises for their
children.
Only it is harder now. Not harder physically, to be sure. The men and women who
pushed their plows with horses or oxen through unturned bottomland died young. But if they
persisted, and they did, they could raise their own church, choose their own schoolmaster, and
pass on their farms to their own children-with no interference from a distant government. And if
opportunity ran out, it was off and over the next ridge, all the way to the Willamette Valley in
Oregon.
But to get that far, government had to help-with the Cumberland trail over the
Alleghenies, with subsidies to the railroads, with irrigation works to water the parched West.
Government knew its role was to help.
It is harder now to think clearly about government in this year of the Bicentennial. It
strikes me now that we are crossing some vast invisible ridge of the mind, that an era is ending.
We are locked into a crush of big organizations that squeeze us all-Big Government, Big
Business, Big Unions. From the candidates of the Right to the candidates of the Left, all are
trying to pry open or keep open the opportunity which once lay over the next ridge.
But it is far more complicated today. There will be no opportunity for black children in
the ghettoes unless the government reorganizes our big cities; yet the cities will become
all-black ghettoes if the government forces policies that drive white families away. If the
government mangles American industry with controls, it can halt the engines of prosperity; yet
if it does not restrain Big Business, there will be no little businessmen seeding the future with
new enterprise.
This valley I see from my window needs government to keep its water clean and its air
clear. This vast country needs government to save its cities and defend its shores and skies. But
if government crushes opportunity-what then?
All these months I have been listening to men, one of whom will certainly be our next
President, making their promises and seeking to keep opportunity open. None have real
answers, as yet. All their discourse reduces to questions.
Perhaps that is the meaning of America: the unending question of how to enlarge
opportunity while yet maintaining an orderly, balanced government of free men. That was the
question with which America began. And the enduring vitality of the question is as important to
the spirit of America as the answer any new President can give.
_________________
"I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat." -Edgar Allen Poe"I knew there was something special about you, but I never realized you were really a cat." Wolfwood to a random cat (Trigun)
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