AMERICA: IS BIG STILL BETTER?

Here's the funny thing about societies and the people in them. Most times they grow outward, starting small and looking to becoming larger. In America's case, it's been the opposite. We started large, but lately have tended to become smaller. Neither way is right; it's just the way it is.

Consider America when it was first discovered by the Old World. With the exception of Russia, the Old World of Europe was a cluster of small countries all squeezed into one little corner of the Euro-Asian continent. In seeking to grow outward, Europeans began colonizing this large new continent they had bumped into in the15th C.

And large it was, with vast sprawling forests and mountains and rivers. The first task for these new Americans was to cut and trim this vastness so it could be "tamed." The great push later into the West would fine even more vastness in its endless spaces and prairies. Government literally gave land away to beg Easterners to come out West and tame all this. This, what many saw as a mythic new Garden of Eden.

Actually, this America of ours has always been so big and roomy that we were one of the first nations in history where everyone in a family could have their very own room! In other parts of the world, even today, families squeeze and share their limited space. Here it's still a mark of pride that every kid has their own private room.

And so America, the-large-and the-mighty, has been busy for generations taming all that it has. Until lately. Lately we've begun to realize all that we have (and presumed endless) is starting to run out. Land, resources, and unlimited tomorrows. When John F. Kennedy spoke of "The New Frontier" he was referring to a frontier which now meant taming what we already had versus simply finding more to have.

While the American psyche and appetite still crave "more" (in everything from GNP to missiles), we've been advised by our best thinkers to think not only expansion. But also conservation.

Turns out some Americans don't like the sound of this. Thinking small is so un-American....! But other Americans are backing into this new fact of life with the idea it's a good time to pull back and save what we have. Let the world and its bloody wars on its own. Not unlike the Brits after WWII gradually relinquished their heavy role as the world's super-power empire.

Think kids crawling under their winter blankets at night; into their snug snow forts during the day. Think lovers huddled under beach umbrellas during the summer; hugged together in front of roaring fireplaces in winter. Think neighbors buying cozy local, leaving the vast shopping malls to others. Think Americ re-thinking who it wants to be here in the 21st C.