The heart of the American character and American Destiny is the road. Our heroes – both real and fictive – are road warriors. In Tidewater days we have Daniel Boone traversing the Cumberland Gap, George Rogers Clark seeking the Northwest Passage…and we continue westering with Lewis, Clark, Pike, Bridger and Carson. We have the foundational fiction of Natty Bumpo that leads to Sal Paradise. Americans are made to journey. Often, we don’t know where we are going but we never lose the feeling that we are halfway there. America is not a destination, but an adventure on a road that leads over the next horizon. We are in near-perpetual motion, racing to the next best thing…whether it is a new refrigerator or a mission to Mars.
Perhaps it is time to take the exit from our manic journey. We need to put down some roots …to sit and reflect on who we are and what we have become. Our dramatic contacts with racism and the pandemic in recent days demand reflection and a level of thinking that can’t occur at highway speed. Perhaps our new frontiers are frontiers of the mind. There is a difference between mere movement and effective action.
The covid rescue plan is being voted on in the senate as I write this and I am encouraged by the large scale vision it embodies. Sometimes it is wise to take the time to slow down and think globally… to resist the “white line fever” of our usual passage through space. We can only go so far on intuition…sooner or later some deep and deliberate thought will be required. There is a lingering doubt that frantic American road warriors can slow to a speed that makes thinking possible. The Buddha says this: “if you are quiet enough, you will hear the flow of the universe” and while I am not naive enough to believe that the average Congress person will ever reach this level of insight or clarity of thought, I remain hopeful that we will seek the quiet place of reason.
The Bill just passed.
Olio Folio 