I Really Miss That American Glow

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.courant.com/news/local/hc-colin1104.artnov04,0,6891677.column?coll=hc_home_xpromo

I find I have a curious nostalgia these days for the America I grew up in.

Maybe that America was just an idea, but you can live in an idea as surely as you can live in a physical space.

I was an American kid living in a suburb in the early 1960s. My parents were rock-ribbed Goldwater Republicans. The United States was the best country on earth.

We said the Pledge of Allegiance every day, and when a space capsule went up, the teachers stopped class and hauled out a big black-and-white TV on a rolling cart, and we all watched and clapped. Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Wally Schirra. Rhymes with hurrah. Our fifth-grade teachers told us the Soviets let their capsules come down on land, instead of water, because they didn't care whether the cosmonauts inside lived or died. Bad Russians.

God, I miss that American glow. I can feel it right now, as surely as I can remember the sun gleaming across a snow fort I built with my friends on Pleasant Street in West Hartford or the wink of fireflies as we played hide-and-seek in a field on Wells Road. America was the best place on earth, from sea to shining sea, and we lived there.

What came next were years of dark moments. Assassinations, riots, the Vietnam War, Watergate. The last of these was especially hard for my Republican Dad. He watched the hearings on television, and Watergate became a big fat python, winding itself around his trust and constricting. He watched with his mouth half open, and from time to time he would say, as if to himself and heaven, "These people are evil."

And after that, he was never a Republican again.

[Dhalgren]

1. I miss that America, too.

I grew up poor. We had a home, my father worked a steady job, my mother stayed home. We didn't have much, but we were happy - at least the kids were, if my parents had problems we didn't know about them. But our life was a lie. We would watch Black kids getting beaten and fire-hosed on the streets of Birmingham and my dad would say terrible things about them. We would watch as US soldiers and Vietnamese civilians were mutilated and killed for absolutely no reason at all. And it went on and on. That America - the one that glowed - wasn't everyone's America; it belonged to only some Americans. And so, it was a lie. The one we see now is more truthful, but it is a horror to behold. It is an old horror - just new to some of us...

[raccoon]

3. Great post.

"fire-hosed on the streets of Birmingham and my dad would say terrible things about them."

I remember a fundie I used to work with said things like that.

And this dip professed to be such a Christian, yet he was so racist.

[NNN0LHI]

9. Yep, great post

Dhalgren does that a lot.

Don

[RaleighNCDUer]

2. I, also.

I grew up as an overseas brat in the 60s. Even with VN going on, everywhere I went through that decade I was greeted with friendship - even in France, which had closed out all our bases there. I was an American, and everybody liked the Americans. Everybody trusted the Americans. Germany. Spain. England. After I graduated from HS I spent three months hitching around the continent with an American flag sewn to my backpack - OK, I did fill in a number of stars to leave a peace sign in the field of blue, but that was not obvious from any distance, and I never caught any grief from the drivers about the flag, or from the Americans I'd meet (I often stopped off at various bases through Italy, Spain and Germany) about the peace sign on it.

Everyone seem so much angrier, now, than I ever saw back then.

[tom_paine]

4. There is something about being a Free Citizen in a Free Nation that material wealth

cannot match nor provide.

Don't get me wrong, I am not necessarily knocking material wealth per se, but I have spent seven years trying to come to grips with my new status which is pretty equivalent, when push comes to shove (although our keepers still treat us with kid gloves until the Bushie transition in fully irreversible) to a Chinese Citizen.

It makes me envy the ignorant Imperial Subjects of Amerika. Cassandra's Curse is not a pleasant one. I wish I didn't know any of this, sometimes.

[Warpy]

5. A lot of GOPs got disgusted with the party

after Nixon lied about his intention to end Vietnam quickly and about his paranoid coverup of Watergate. They reregistered as Democrats and became Blue Dogs, New Democrats and the DLC. They balanced out the Dixie Democrats who were disgusted by having to extend human rights to black folks and women and who joined the GOP. That realignment has a great deal to do with the way the parties and the country have turned out.

[bdamomma]

6. we need to fight back.

just my opinion.

[gateley]

7. K&R. nt

[leveymg]

8. Sounds like my childhood in Fairfield County, only my parents were Adlai Stevenson Democrats.

My father joked that he was probably the only naval officer in the U.S. Sixth Fleet who didn't vote for Ike in 1952.

I was born a few years later, and chased the same Connecticut fireflies and clapped when the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts made it home, safe after each flight. Those were wonderful times to be an American.

Watergate was confirmation of everything we already knew and reviled about Nixon. No shock and awe in our household in 1974. We never did vote Republican, although my father may have secretly made one exception, Jake Javits, when he moved back into town. Greetings! :hi:

[DCKit]

10. We're getting our glow back!!!!

Thanks to *, we're RADIOACTIVE!!!

[spanone]

11. i grew up in the fifties and that 'glow' is gone. dead. kaput. outtahere.

[raccoon]

12. Gone with the wind, if I may use the phrase. nt

[Whisp]

13. there were many who were not allowed to share that 'glow'.

please let us remember that.
Wonderful childhood memories are just hat - for children - but the behind the scenes stuff your government did and still are doing, ain't so glowy. Just think of the many wars, the sickness, death, land mines, the rascism, etc., these were all happening even during those nostalgic great times and still continue.

[Aristus]

14. I remember:

people being outraged by the corruption and powermongering of Watergate. I remember my little brother, four years old, walking into the kitchen and asking my mother: "Mommy, what's a Kissinger?" I remember John Chancellor and David Brinkley bringing the people the news. They weren't very telegenic, but they had integrity and believed in solid journalism. I remember playing with the other kids on the street until past dark and not feeling threatened. I remember riding in my dad's car past miles and miles and endless miles of empty fields that no one was in a hurry to pave over or build luxury condos on. I remember Woodsy Owl on TV, asking people to "give a hoot; don't pollute". I remember trash barrels with the stick figure throwing away his trash, and the slogan "Pitch In!" I remember the sadness and anger my father, a Vietnam Veteran, felt about the war and his attitude of "Never again!" I remember making fun of the President for his 1000-watt grin and Southern accent, but believing that he was a good and decent man who genuinely wanted what was best for the people. I remember my mother snapping off the TV and saying: "It's a beautiful day; why don't you play outside?" And we did. I remember the Apollo-Soyuz spaceflight, the sense of international cooperation, and giving all the other kids in school the thumbsup and an "A-OK!". I remember the local high school students who sat with us while our parents attended school meetings. I remember their sunhats and long hair and embroidered jeans, and their sunny, friendly personalities.

[DFW]

15. It's still out there. You just gotta look a lot harder, that's all.

I have been stationed overseas much of the time since the late seventies.
I take short vacations all over the map, but for long ones, I still pack
up those family members still here, and haul ass over to New England, where
it's not crowded, the people are friendly, and I feel like this is my country
(and I'm a southerner!). Where you aren't a nobody if you aren't rich, and
you don't need a title to garner someone's respect.

My children perceive it, too. They grew up here in Europe, and love it here
when they come "home" for a visit, but they have both chosen to live and study
in the USA because they feel that glow that so many feel has ebbed. They have
been at schools in Hawai'i, Southern California, Washington, D.C., and the New
York area, where they both are now. School is hard, but it's interesting, and
they have adapted to each new environment. The elder one is in a miserably small
apartment in Manhattan that is obscenely expensive for the 19th century shape
the place is in, but she loves the neighborhood and the people, and doesn't want
to move (unless I win the lottery and can afford $3000 a month for a better place,
and since I don't play the lottery, the likelihood of that is minimal at best).

But there are things going on, people to see and go out with, and places to go.
Maybe it's because America is still relatively new to them (6 years for the younger
one, 5 years for her elder sister) as a place to live as opposed to a place to visit.
Maybe, though, it takes the perspective of an outsider to appreciate that vestige of
the American spirit which we all yearn for, and so many can't seem to conjure up
any more. But it's in America that a guy can write a book called "The Audacity of Hope,"
and get it taken seriously. Such a title would fall flat in France or Germany, and in
Russia, Putin wouldn't even let you publish it unless it praised him. Obama, too, has
had the perspective of being bi-cultural and having lived outside the country.

Yes, I realize that with the media being taken over by the body-snatchers and the
government being grabbed by the 21st century equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition,
and our foreign policy doing us as much good as that of the Third Reich did for
Germany, it is difficult to maintain a sense of optimism, let alone a good feeling
about the USA these days. But the words of the people who made it a place to dream
still make up our Constitution, and if only we can once again elevate people who
respect those words (as opposed to the current thugs who would prefer we forget them),
we have a chance at regaining the glow. The embers may be fading, but a bit of fresh
kindling can still re-light the spark, I'm still confident of that.