Last spring I drove out to Wichita, Kansas, from the North Country and found myself pleasantly surprised by the bustle and beauty of the America I was seeing.<\/p>\n
Because of a family emergency, I now find myself driving from Wenatchee, Washington to Wichita, Kansas — a different chunk of the country completely but I’m finding myself with the same general impression.<\/p>\n
The RV parks (yes, I’m perched at the helm of a massive, 40-foot long Winnebago…) are crammed full.\u00a0 The roads are busy with tractor-trailers, and the farms and ranches seem almost cliched in their trim, well-tended appearance.<\/p>\n
The little towns I pass seem tidy and proud and inviting.<\/p>\n
The experience is more strange because we have a television in the rig and at night I’m watching far more of CNN, Fox and MSNBC than I usually see in a year’s time.<\/p>\n
The general impression one finds there is very, very different:\u00a0 a fraying Union, hectic and furious, beset by illegal aliens, the economy nearly at the point of implosion, the environment unraveling before our eyes.<\/p>\n
And everyone — everyone — is angry about something.\u00a0 It’s exhausting and numbing and, at least in significant measure, false.<\/p>\n
Anyone who knows my reporting (and my rants over a glass of wine) also knows that I’m no pollyana.\u00a0 There are plenty of problems in the North Country.\u00a0 And plenty of big problems in the country.<\/p>\n
But I keep thinking it’s time to push back against the insistence (from the left and the right) that we live our lives constantly as if the house were on fire.<\/p>\n
I’ve never known anyone to get much of anything of quality or meaning done when they were panting (or ranting) in that feverish way.<\/p>\n
It’s comforting to find that when the sound and fury begin to overwhelm you, you can still get out on the open road of America and find that it’s still a place of richness, generosity, expansive vision, and (yes) opportunity.<\/p>\n
Your thoughts?\u00a0 Post below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last spring I drove out to Wichita, Kansas, from the North Country and found myself […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2426"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2426\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}