America Will Be Different

But we come on a ship they called Mayflower

We come on a ship that sailed the moon

We come in the ages' most uncertain hours and sing an American tune...

But it's alright, it's alright, for we live so well, so long

Still, when I think of the road we're traveling on

I wonder what's gone wrong, I can't help it I wonder what's gone wrong.*

                                                           - Paul Simon "American Tune"

My wife has ancestors who came to America on the Mayflower, which means that our sons and granddaughter do too.  My mother was, and our daughter-in-law is, a Daughter of the American Revolution.  And on July 20, 1969, the day after my 19th birthday, along with a messhall full of Boy Scouts at the camp where I worked, we listened while Neil Armstrong set foot on another new world.  We stayed up all night after that, drinking coffee and talking about what it meant.  We decided they should turn and face Earth, and tell us that they weren't coming home until we ended the war in Vietnam.

I also have an undergraduate degree that allows me to teach American history, although I never did that.  I'm and Eagle Scout.  For twenty years, I've listened to the NPR commentators recite the Declaration of Independence every July 4th.  I've marched in countless protest marches, and I've served as a County legislator.  Which is to say, I am an American, immersed in America and all it means.  I get America.

In the new world, America will be different.  Not simply because of the pandemic; changes were coming before it started.  Are we an empire in decline, like so many others before us?  So much of the news seems to be about the US being left behind.  

"America's story is in trouble," the New York Times tells us.  “To a historian it’s nothing new, that’s what happens. It’s a very familiar story in world history that after a certain amount of time a power declines... You accumulate problems, and because you’re such a strong player, you can carry these dysfunctionalities for a long time... Until something happens and you can’t anymore.”

I think there is much of value in America, the great experiment.  I don't mean the easy patriotism of flags and fireworks, but the hard work of democracy - a republic, if we can keep it.  

So – a new America in the new world. What will it begin to look like?