Reply #70: Your thoughts sound to me like the thoughts of a patriot. [View All]

[saltpoint]

Again -- not the Reagan-style patriot, but the Paine patriot, the true patriot -- the one who knows why Huck rejected all that civilizin' and headed out for the western territories.

But who loves what's lost nevertheless. It's the loved part and not the lost part that matters.

We haven't learned just yet how to re-program our imaginations. Used to be, say back in 1818, young people stood on docks and at the edges of their small agricultural towns and imagined that vast western expanse, considered its dangerous animals and its indigenous peoples, and the dreams those kids dreamed were of that frontier. There was this collective imagination, this we're-dreaming-the-same dream dream.

Not Manifest Destiny, not driving the Sioux into the mountains, not giving smallpox-infested blankets to the Mandan. Not that.

This: that at 11 or 13 or even 19 a child could dream of a frontier-born greatness well beyond and far better than the shitwagon his father's 2 mules are pulling into town for supplies.

In our modern age we have coast-to-coast airplane flights and our satellites can hone in on golf matches and soccer games from Seattle to Key West in seconds.

We'll find a poetry to match our technological imaginations and another frontier will appear. The mother or father of that 11 or 13 year old in 1818 could not have imagined back in England or Germany, for instance, that THEIR child would be dreaming of grizzly bears and wild ponies and trees as tall as Heaven.

Let an alien race from a greatly superior galaxy come to find us down here on our measly little planet. They won't care if we have corrupt politicians or drive-through pharmacies or lamps that light when we clap our hands. But Chopin's Nocturnes, Georgia O'Keeffe's flowers, and Adrienne Rich's poems are going to blow their asses away.