Travels in America

John Steinbeck once set out on a journey across America in a custom pickup truck camper named Rocinante after Don Quixote's horse and his standard Poodle named Charlie.  Last week I set out on a less quixotic journey in my Volkswagen with my wife and two teenagers.  Still, when you travel you almost can't help but learn things, experience things and come back a little different than you were when you left.  Steinbeck's overwhelming assessment was that America was so very full of good people, but our publicity is terrible.  Travels in America with Charlie, was written in a seemingly different age, but it seems to me that America retains a very similar character.  We are better than we look, we are kinder than we sound, and we are more welcoming than you might imagine.
Our little family covered quite a bit of ground, Pennsylvania, to a little town that was our home for ten years, all the way across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and then into Wisconsin.  We stayed in a place on the edge of a tourist destination, skirting around the water parks and amusements of the Wisconsin Dells, never actually getting very close to them.  Then we went to Chicago, the second city and seemingly ate our way through that town like a hungry caterpillar.  Finally, we spent a night in Cincinnati, an act which inspired curious consternation among all who heard of it. Then we took the scenic route home through the hills of Kentucky, the mountains of West Virginia and Virginia and back home to the tidewaters of Maryland.  In between those places were the vast miles of interstate highway, across flat lands that reminded me of the Meseta.  The sky was the landscape and the clouds were all there was to see.  But of course this was America, and so there was advertising as well.  Advertising for food, for lawyers, for God himself.  The advertising for God was striking, and unsettling, to a traveling preacher.  It sent me back with a sermon illustration at the very least, but also I think, with a bit of a prophetic vision of something that needs some fixing.
The lectionary texts for yesterday were from Isaiah 58 and Luke 13.  The Isaiah text describes the way that God's people are supposed to change the world for the better, to have their "light rise in the darkness," to be "repairers of the breach."  Luke tells the story of Jesus healing a woman on the Sabbath and invoking the predictable wrath of the religious folk because he broke the rules.  In the Gospel, the masses of people seem to have the good sense to rejoice in the healing and grace of God, it is the synagogue leader(s) who are shamed by their own hypocrisy.
Out there in America, I have seen so many little churches, who I do not doubt are doing good things, working to help their neighbors and create community and common good.  Then there are the billboards that seem to be trying to get people to be scared of God, and Hell and proclaiming judgment.  It produces a sort of cognitive dissonance that is becoming all too familiar.  It is not new, it was one of Steinbeck's major observations on his travels: America is more than what she seems.
Maybe it's just that old truism that Yeats pointed out:

The best lack all conviction;

The worst work with passionate intensity.

It's tempting to believe that, but I don't think the best lack conviction at all, they're just not interested in billboards, marketing schemes and branding.  This is why social media has become such a toxic sludge, because the good and the wise have learned to disengage from it.  On some rare occasions, a prophet arises who can use the tools for good, a Shane Claiborne or a William Barber III, masters the art of dancing on the cess pool without sinking, but it is more miracle than skill.

Too much of our public discourse has been taken forcibly by those who shout the loudest.  But America is a decent place that deserves better publicity.  We are not a nation of backward, bigoted, angry people, even if our figurehead wannabe emperor is exactly that. I'm not looking at this thing through rose tinted lenses either.  I saw the good, the bad and the ugly on our little jaunt through the Rust Belt and the Midwest and the upper south.  I saw lots of places where people still make things and I saw the new, clean, renewable technology that harnesses the wind to make us go.  I saw some really poor places and some ostentatious signs of wealth as well.  I saw signs of strip mines that had scoured the tops off of beautiful mountains, and I saw those mountains slowly turning green again.  We stayed in a neighborhood that was bustling with people who spoke Spanish and worked on a tricked out low riding van parked in the street, we smelled some really good things being cooked as we walked down the street.  They didn't seem like people who didn't belong here, they seemed like people who were the reason this country is great.  We also stayed in a neighborhood that is on that precarious turn from decay to renewal, and may either become something really vibrant or may simply gentrify.  We saw quite a bit of this country, and as glad as I am to be home, I am also rather excited to go see some more, because I need to be reminded more often that we are better than we seem on the news.