It's strangely fascinating to have experienced America's most fantastic frontier - space - and then the reality that we've reached the fullest extent of our horizons. There are no more colonies to settle, no independence to be won, no western boundaries to be pushed & pummeled & pioneered into the United States of America.
We are a nation of expanders without anywhere to expand. For the first time ever. Which makes this an interesting time to be a relatively detached observer with inevitable bias. How are we, as a nation, responding?
On civil rights, we have taken bold new strides in restricting the vote of certain demographics (students, the aged, the poor) OR in restoring sanity to a voting process that could not be trusted because we no longer know who are our fellow citizens & who are not.
On science, we are able to understand the substance & working mechanisms of our bodies, a baby can be born with multiple parents, we have extended our life span while increasingly fearing aging. Within a single generation, the number of Americans who no longer admire scientists, who now all things scientific & any scientific findings is jaw dropping. Evolution is out & creationism is in.
People are called bigots for believing that marriage is meant to be between a man & a woman and rigid for believing it's meant to be between ONE man & ONE woman. They're called uptight & Puritan if they believe sex should be treated as something akin to sacred & should be reserved for after marriage.
We tear down the trees & tear up the land, use precious water for drilling & dismiss any fear of polluting the ground water with the chemicals used in fracking. We are astonished that six feet of snow fell on Buffalo, NY over a week before Thanksgiving, but give nary a thought that last year's brutal winter or this years astonishing mid-November - when 50% of the USA was covered in snow - could be related to the steady decimation of sub-Arctic forests by logging, hydrodams, mining and now tar sands excavation.
We are a nation torn between what the majority of citizens believe & the sometimes polar opposite beliefs of the shockingly low # who get out & vote in our Congress.
How did Americans respond to the loss of frontiers? Well, seems to me that the country's imploding. Millions hold tight to an original dream which they don't actually know or understand - who assume the founders hearts & minds were one with theirs. They hold on tight to what they believe was, refusing to reweave the American dream for today's America. And THAT is what we need to do, Step back, see where our country is today, and have a national discussion, at all levels, to consider what is our dream for our country which leads to the inevitable hard-to-accept question - how does a nation that came together to conquer frontiers live peacefully together with a land-locked dream?
We can continue to implode, or we can start reweaving our nation's dream. The founders delivered the Miracle in Philadelphia (infinitely more astonishing than beating the Brits); we can at least do all we can to make good on a reweaving a new dream for our beloved nation.
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