THE NIFTY FIFTY

As we come to the end of summer, it is time to take our minds off Middle East maelstroms, California circuses, and world craziness in general, and spend time instead on a summer soliloquy.

For some time now, my youngest son Jackson and I have been embarked on a project we call his “Nifty Fifty.”  That is, for him to travel to and learn something really interesting about each of all fifty American states.

Jackson is now 11 years old.  He has been with me twice around the world and to the North Pole three times.  He has been 2,000 km across the Gobi Desert and Mongolia, 2,500 km across eastern Tibet, 3,000 km across the Sahara, and lived with Eskimos in Greenland and tribes in the heart of the Amazon.  But above all, I want him to experience his own country, America.

This summer, instead of wandering off to some remote corner of the globe, we concentrated on his Nifty Fifty.  At the summer’s start, Jackson was at 26.  Now, at summer’s end, he’s at 40.  In a succession of trips in July and August, he and I have driven almost 6,000 miles (10,000 kilometers) across our country.

Of course, Dad gets something out of this too.  For me, this has been an opportunity to re-experience my country, to learn more about it along with Jackson.  And the main lesson is this:  America — the real America — is still here.

We are all being inundated from the Left and the Right with the message that America is going to hell in a handbasket.  From the Left we get the message of hate, since a distinguishing characteristic of liberals is an endless attempt to appease the envy of America’s critics.  From the Right we get the message of fear, since a distinguishing characteristic of conservatives seems to be an endless state of anguish over America’s losing her virtues.

Not that conservatives can’t marshal considerable evidence for their anguish, the Mexicanification of California and the Supreme Court sodomizing Texas being two examples from a multitude.  Nonetheless, after traveling down back roads and wandering through communities from Savannah, Georgia to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, spending time with cowboys in Muskogee, Oklahoma, farmers in the Boot Heel of Missouri, students at Notre Dame in Indiana, fisherfolk in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and presidents of companies in New York City, I can assure you that this is a country of extraordinary cultural strength.

The impact of driving 6,000 miles through America can for me be epitomized in three words:  beauty, peace, and friendliness.

I lost count of the number of times during those 6,000 miles that I was overwhelmed by scenes that caused me to think, “This is such a beautiful country.”  The northeastern corner of Iowa is one huge postcard.  The so-called “Trail of Tears” from Arkansas to Oklahoma is through paradisiacal parkland that any Indian should think was a Happy Hunting Ground.  Then there are the towns.

From Galena, Illinois to New Bern, North Carolina, America is filled with beautiful towns with beautiful homes.  Yet America’s beauty is of a particular kind — not ostentatious and imposing, but a Middle Class Beauty, prosperous, comfortable, well-kept, clean, regular people living good lives and taking care of what is theirs.

Liberals will now be scoffing at this point, asking what about all the slums, the poverty, the crime, the hicks in their undershirts on the front porch of their shacks with their yard littered with empty beer cans and old cars up on cinder blocks?   That stuff is out there all right, but it’s isolated and rare.  Like the small blue islands amidst the vast red ocean in the US County map depicting the 2000 presidential election results (Bush red, Gore blue).

You have to go out of your way to search and find those poverty patches the liberals caterwaul about and claim are Typical America.  Drive 6,000 miles and you will learn they are Atypical America.  Like liberals themselves.

America the Beautiful is not just a song — it is reality.  Another reality is America the Peaceful.  This is the antithesis of a violent country.  Trust me, I have been in a lot of wars, and in a lot of countries enduring a lot of violence.  Countries with a lot of soldiers patrolling streets and guarding buildings, where people are nervous, skittish, and suspicious.  America is the opposite.  America exudes an aura of peacefulness.  Everywhere Jackson and I went, folks were going about their lives peacefully — the total opposite of fearful suspicion.

The third reality that most impressed Jackson and me is America the Friendly.  In hundreds of interactions, from trap shooters in Bellefontaine, Ohio, backwoodsfolk in the hills of southern Tennessee, people on the streets of Chicago when you ask them for directions, vendors in Charleston, South Carolina, high school kids in Dallas, on and on, people were pleasant and friendly toward us.

We live in such an incredibly wonderful country.  We can get back to all its problems in September.  Just take a moment now to put all of our national woes aside, and reflect how impossibly lucky we are to be living in this place at this moment in history.

I am trying my best to enable Jackson to experience this first-hand.  He’s getting a handle on America’s origins, from where the first shot was fired at North Bridge in Concord to the last at Surrender Field in Yorktown.  He’s seen America’s wonders from Yellowstone to Mammoth Cave.  Yet he is coming to understand that America’s greatest wonder is Americans themselves.

One afternoon we were driving through a small town in eastern Oklahoma.  We drove past a couple in a pick up truck.  They were clearly in their sixties or seventies, grandma and grandpa.  Grandma, however, wasn’t sitting by the passenger window.  She was sitting in the middle, next to grandpa, like they were teen-agers on a first date.

I pointed them out to Jackson, and reminded him of the line in a favorite song of his, American Pie, where Don McLean sings about his being “a teen-age bronking buck with a pink carnation and a pick up truck.”  “That is so cool,” was Jackson’s observation.  “Old folks just like teen-agers.”  He looked at me with a big smile.  “Only in America, huh, Dad?” he asked.

“That’s right, buddy.” I replied.  “You’ll only see that in America.”