To look for America.....

Simon and Garfunkel performed a song about a young couple riding a bus and looking for America.  My friend and former commander mentioned today on Facebook that there's a bit of an exodus of people leaving California (and other states, potentially) and he mused that he thought they might be looking for the America they remembered when they were growing up, or that their parents told them about.

Those words stuck with me today.  Maybe it was because the first thing I saw this morning in my neighborhood was the guy across the street teaching his son to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.  My neighbor and I had a quick chat this morning about that, about church (he invited me to his), and about chairs, which I am building for my deck.  He said to me that you had "start 'em off young".  My reply was that "We were." and we were.  The pledge was the first thing we did in elementary school.  By junior high, we didn't do that.  By high school, I'd not heard it for a long time.  

That's what America looked like to me this morning. And maybe, that's why I got stuck on them.  I got to wondering just exactly what America he thought these people might be searching for.  I don't know my friend's entire story, but I wonder what America he grew up in.  What America was lost that these people were fleeing to.... and I wonder if it resembled the America I grew up in.  

The America I grew up in was cruel.  We didn't belong to the predominant religion in our community.  My mother had me out of wedlock in 1964.  No big deal now, but in 1964, it was a thing.  I told a young friend the other day that I grew up in the 'hood.  He was just pretend.  I know the real thing.  I know what it's like to be beaten up by a black kid because you were white.  That happened to me.  I saw some of the  poor white people in my neighborhoods growing up treating the poor black and brown people with contempt, simply because they were a different color and somehow, by that, it made the black and brown less worthy of being a fellow human being.  It gave the white folk that acted this way some sense of superiority when on every other scale, economically and socially, they were equal or less.  I've heard horrible words used against ethnic people and I'm not proud to say, that I used some of them myself against some Asian immigrants who moved into our neighborhood.  Black church was a thing then.  There was one in my neighborhood.  Black church is still a thing.  That's the reality in Black America.

That's the America I grew up in.  I found a different America waiting for me when I joined the military.  I met people from all over America.  From the South, from New England, from Texas, and all over the country.  Including Hawaii.  The America each of us was from came together as a group of 50 young men who would serve her for the next few years of their lives.

My journeys through America are vast.  I've seen America from Bangor.  From Portsmouth.  From Oklahoma City.  From the rural towns in the west.  And from watching things change in my part of America as wealth took more and more of the good land and pigeon holed the poor to the "bad side of town".  I've seen racism in a bar in Lancaster, California in the summer of 2004.  A  kid was trying to be my buddy and thought it was all right to use a detestable word to describe African-Americans in front of me because we were both white.

It wasn't.

I told you about my America growing up.  But it also included the riots in LA.  The black panthers.  The Simbianese Liberation Army ala' Patty Hearst.  Helter Skelter.  Hippies.  And yet, we put a man on the moon.  The America I grew up in had rivers that caught on fire.  The president was a crook.  Then Iran took hostages.  That was the America of my youth.  Gas was in short supply.  The president after the president that pardoned the crook was unpopular and ineffective.  Interest rates were terrible.  Morale was low.  All these things were a part of the America I grew up in.

So what America does my friend think they're looking for?  The white picket fence?  The mom at home, go to church on Sunday, Dad working for the same company for 30 years and then gets a pension and retires?  Was it the one that Mr. Bradford raised his 8 children on tv in?  Or the California that Mike and Carol showed us?  Is it the America Archie Bunker lived in, or the America that George Jefferson overcame?  Was it the America that Barbara Cooper lived in with a single mom and a sister? Is it the America where JJ got shot or the one where JR got shot?   What IS America, anyway?

Is is some nonsensical idea that if you live under a Democrat governor, that it's not America?  Does my friend remember the mess that was Hurricane Katrina that drove some very poor Americans far from their homes?  What America were they fleeing from, and fleeing to?  My point is that America is so diverse that it changes literally from ZIP code to ZIP code.  In my version of America, the next town is literally over the back fence and there are roads in that town that are not paved.  That people live and regularly drive on in town.  In 2020.  And in my America, a young man dressed like he was from the 'hood draws suspicion because he doesn't look like he's from around here....(that happened last week).   So again, if America is so diverse that we change from ZIP Code to ZIP code, then what is America?                

To me, America isn't so much a place as it is an ideal.  We constantly fall short of those ideals, but we get it right eventually.  We've survived some foolishness before.  We will again.  Because America, the ideal, isn't Utopia.  It's a conglomeration of people from all kinds of walks of life.  We have profound disagreements on where we should head.  Me personally, I have some strong feelings about what we do and allow these days because I know it's a matter of time that God will give us over to our own lusts.  That's just historical.  But we're still in charge of that American idea that we need to work better to have all men created equal.  That  we're committed to the ideals that our founding fathers, flawed men that they were, aspired to be.

Our idea of America, I think, is shaped largely on what our circumstances and geography are.  The 'hood of my childhood was a rough place for a milquetoast place like Salt Lake City, compared to the ghettos of the major American cities.  The trailer park is a long way from Beverly Hills.  The 1950s are gone and that version of America is, too.  Times have changed.  We have too.

Right now, there are two competing versions of what America should be.  One, in my opinion, is predicated on the lie that America was not great.  There has never been a time that America wasn't great.  We're kind of in a bit of a mess right now, but in reality, the America of the 2020's is very much the America I grew up in.  Race is still an issue.  Hatred and bigotry and poverty still exist.  But so do places where a father goes out on a Sunday morning,, and kneeling beside his young son, recites the Pledge of Allegiance, had over heart, while facing the flag.