With
the visiting of Mount Rushmore and several state and national parks, I felt a
heightened sense of responsibility to talk about our national character with
our girls. About what the American spirit is. Or was. I’m not sure where they
get that now – certainly not from the news. From education? I don’t know. I
just want them to feel grateful and understand the perspective and perseverance
that was required from generations to provide them what they have today. I want
them to feel the grandness of this idea and the protections put in place
against the folly of fallen humanity and its lust for power. Mostly, I want it
to be true.
I
want an American spirit that believes primarily in sacrifice and the common
good. Is it in us? I am jealous of other generations, jealous of their
sparseness. Jealous of their struggles and dangers. Is that a crazy thing to
say? We have not been asked to conserve for the war effort. We have not been
asked to serve. I’m not sure anyone even tries to use the phrase, “Your
patriotic duty,” anymore, even in the most idyllic of settings. What are we
made of, now? How would we respond to crisis, aside from attempts to alternately
deify political leaders and then damn them when we don’t get what we want? What
do we want, now? What is worthy of our efforts?
We
have no West to conquer and explore. Our biggest aims are to find shinier and
and quicker and more self-serving tools of distraction, or at least to make
enough money to buy them when someone creates them and tells us our personal
value depends on our ownership of it. We are sanitized from the wars we fight
as a nation, and rather than responsibility to our soldiers we speak of war
fatigue and our disinterest in the world’s affairs. We know more about Netflix
and Youtube than the plight of humanity, and we’d prefer to keep it that way.
I
lean to John Steinbeck on this one. If anyone has captured this transition
better than him, I have not read them yet. Steinbeck understood the lostness
that would occur when the big challenges went away. He saw and wrote repeatedly
about how what would harm us the most is what we sought with greatest vigor in
the mid-Twentieth Century: comfort, security, and luxury. And here we are,
overfed, overspent, and in overdrive, chasing nothing and worn out from doing
it, managing to lift our heads and scream only when our personal comforts are
not immediately met.
My
wife said during our trip that a visit to Mount Rushmore is one of the closest
things we have to a national pilgrimage. It felt like one. And I felt a
stirring of hope that pieces of the American spirit that I tried failingly to
speak to my children about were still left in us when we sat together in an amphitheater
after sundown with 2,000 other people and paid tribute in unison to those who
had served in our military while a beam of light amplified four iconic
presidents. We were unified in our respect for sacrifice, service, and a proud
history. I did not want to leave.
Of
course, pieces of that hope died while watching a percentage of the audience
rush out before the military recognition in an attempt to avoid the discomforts
of traffic. . .
It
is hard for me to know whether the national spirit is merely our history, or if
it is reality shielded by weak leadership and the noise of consumerism. I know
that whether it is myth or mystery, I am complicit. But gazing on the
Presidents, and visiting state and national parks that have been protected and
valued for the common good of all people in all generations to appreciate, even
for a mere couple of days, is enough to spur the desire to personally claim it
as our legacy and to want to participate so that it does not die.
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