A DEATH IN AMERICA

America may be dying a little bit each day. Perhaps not your America, but the America the rest of us knew during the last half of the last century. A pretty good America when you consider it tamed a Depression, won a World War, became the most productive economic empire in history, and along the way began to free blacks and women and gays and ghettos.

The "death" is the dying off, one by one, of all those brilliant little pieces that somehow fit together to create the enormous 20th C American mosaic. Lets me count the brilliant little pieces as some of them begin to disappear...

Live national radio programming...live national television broadcasting...weekly national magazines like "Life," "The Saturday Evening Post," and now perhaps "Newsweek"...national news services like the UP. The operative words are live and national, meaning most everyone from sea to shining sea once heard and saw the same things at the same time. Regardless of race or nationality or gender or region or party.

One of the few times this now happens is tragedies like 9/11. What happened that day is precisely what is dying off. That sense of immediate participation by almost all 300 million Americans. When there were no filters, no intermediaries, no cable pundits and bloggers to get between us and an event which binds and bonds us together. As a people, as a nation, as a force.

Without such togetherness, a diversity-rich society like this becomes all centrifugal thrust outward into a thousand different directions with all too little gravitational force drawing us inward. To beat a Depression, win a War, conquer space, or change history, 21st C America may want to use some of its 20th C American ways.

Coming from the 20th C tends to make you recall such ways. Then again, most of America's proudest national holidays are also about recalling...!