America, older but never wiser

Canada and America both had birthdays this week.  Theirs was more consequential.

Not, however, in the way that birthdays are supposed to be: not with lots of joy and singing and celebrations of achievement.

America alights in its 250th year with none of that, really. No discernible joy, no proper celebrations, no singing by anyone you would ever want to hear. Uncharitable as it may sound, America slides into its 250th year like a dead and decomposing whale on a remote beach somewhere, foul and desiccated, but too big to easily remove.

So the rest of us stare at it, marveling at what it once was, not what it is. Wondering if we should blow it up, like in a YouTube video, or just wait for the tide to take it back.

What America 2026 is, on which there is broad agreement in the rest of the world, is a failure. America was never a perfect union, of course (nothing is). But it has now permitted its imperfect id to seize the wheel, and steer the whole shebang into the ditch. 

America was always crazy, but it always had a certain charm, too. Even as a kid, attending David G. Burnett Elementary School in suburban Dallas, Texas, I liked reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, my eight year-old hand positioned above my heart. Even then, I liked the notion of being connected to something greater than oneself.  I can still recite it, word for word.

And then, of course, there was the craziness: the friendly Dallas neighbor, outlining how she'd use her rifle to prevent the arrival of Black children at the aforementioned David G. Burnett. A friend of a friend, killed in a gunfight in a bar, and no one seeming to be very alarmed or even upset by the news. My father, a young doctor, expressing disgust about a system that bankrupted people just because they got sick. 

My own experience with their craziness was limited, but memorable: our teachers, for example, would require us to have regular air raid drills in which we would be instructed to crouch, silent, under our smallish desktops. To protect us against an errant bombing run by the North Vietnamese Air Force, 9000 miles off-course? To shelter against the radiation that would follow a Soviet nuclear ballistic missile attack on Texan suburbia?

I'd ask my father why. "They're Americans," he'd say. "They're different from us."

They sure are.

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