Culture
America’s Not Dead Yet
The good people are still there — to find them, stop watching the news
I’ve lived outside the US for thirteen years, through terms under Obama, Trump, and Biden. Years of news snippets that are never positive, years of pundits who try to make light of a lot of unhappiness. It warps my recollections.
Every few years, I make a pilgrimage back to see family. It’s on this trip that I see for myself if things are as dire as they sound. They never are, and for that, I’m grateful.
I grew up in a small town, but it’s not really “small,” like a town out west in the big states, because mine was in a sea of small towns squished together. It’s a town along the gradual fall-off of population density from Boston outward into the leafy suburbs and beyond into quaint New England areas where everything looks frozen in time.
When we visit, we stay with my brother. He now lives one town over from where we grew up, not far from where my parents grew up, not far from where my parents now live. The towns are much the same. Each settled in the mid-to-late 1600s. Each has a brick public high school, a set of cafes and small shops, all called a “bedroom community.” They roll up the streets after dinner, and the last shop to close is the ice cream store.
