Maybe I’m just naively optimistic, but I feel so many positive and hopeful feelings when I look around. And the old days? I wouldn’t change a thing, I was incredibly fortunate to grow up when and where I did, and I hate it how much more limited my kids lives are then mine when I used to ride a bike all over town, I mean what are we so scared of??, but I also remember crouching under a desk during the air raid drills, and lots more that I’d rather not bring back. I see a lot of young people, and they seem at least as nice, thoughtful and right-thinking as the kids I grew up with. Maybe more “sophisticated”, but in a good way. I was talking to a friend last week who has done a lot of work in Washington and has a background that could easily have resulted in feelings of revulsion about that scene (about which I know bupkiss), but in fact he is very impressed at the level of integrity he has encountered among the legislators. He even thinks lobbying is a net benefit because it moderates a tendency to extremism. Maybe that’s going too far!
So, globalization. Maybe it was growing up during the cold war, but I’ve never felt any real security about our future as a nation independent of the rest of the world, it always seemed at risk. More positively, I’ve also always felt drawn to a hope for a larger, more inclusive connection, and never thought of it as unpatriotic. I like the idea of being a “world citizen”, I always liked the idea of the United Nations. I know you weren’t a big KT fan as a kid, but I absorbed the world music perspective they had, and John’s line in the New Frontier still resonates for me “now it’s the world and the freedom of man”. It seems to me the best way to secure our future is to work for global peace and development, which seems best assured by the spread of democratic principles to other countries, and alliances amongst those countries. I don’t see that as a threat to the US, just the opposite. And the fall of soviet communism, something I never dreamed would happen, has dramatically changed the options, it seems to me. Saturday night around a campfire I talked with a teacher of African studies at a local college. Originally from Nigeria, he could paralyze you with horrifying stories, but the bottom line was that he was very optimistic about the spread of democracy there after many years of uncertainty and the power of that to curb the corruption that stifles progress throughout the developing world. We traveled in Europe last year, and I didn’t have the impression that there was any loss of national identity, maybe more a gain of a sense of more ‘European’ identity as well, but I don’t really have a basis for making that comparison. Anyway, I guess I just don’t see these global changes as a threat to the American way, rather a vindication of it as the power of the principles spread across the planet. Ok, I guess I am a bit of a Pollyanna, but why not? Open borders are probably the last thing that happens, as countries decide to trust each other. And some never will. The Swiss still haven’t joined, and you still get searched going in and out.
Give ‘em Hell Bob (in a good way! And give us a record to remind us about what matters! I can’t wait!
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