I'm baaack!

 "And here we were just getting used to the peace and quiet," you're saying now.

Well ... sucks to be you, then, as people say. I'm back from 2 1/2 weeks of traveling the width and breadth of the country by plane, train and automobile, and what I got out of all that is this is a stunningly beautiful land we stole from the Original Occupants, and it bears the occasional reminder. We are not the sum total of the nitwits and doom screamers who nitwit and doom-scream in the name of saving America. Indeed, what America really needs saving from is them.

So put your straitjackets back on, children, and resume taking your meds. And for God's sake calm the bleep down.

See, what I learned in our travels to Colorado and San Francisco and Oregon and Washington is America is what each one of us makes of it, and that there are no Others because on some level we're all Others. We get along in this world the best we can, every one of us. And we are an interesting and curious and striving people who are not to be feared simply because we strive each in our own way.

On the train trip across the Great Plains and through the Rockies and Sierra Nevadas, for instance, we met a young Amish couple from Iowa traveling to visit family. We met a self-described anarchist and ordained minister who found us more interesting than himself. We talked Premier League soccer, NBA basketball and cricket with an Englishman who hated the latter, and who was exploring America by train with his bound-for-college son and teenage daughter.

In Colorado, we climbed a windswept hillside brown with prairie grass, and spent some affecting minutes there at the brick wall and circle of inscribed plaques that stand less than a mile from Columbine High School, and commemorates the school shooting there  a quarter century ago. A few minutes later, I felt a chill when we passed the school -- and then another as I reflected how the horror of that day has become the numbness we feel now, hundreds of Columbines later in a nation obsessed with calibration.

San Francisco was, along with much else, a chilled walk across the Golden Gate Bridge on a windblown day that turned sunny and pleasant before we finished, as days are wont to do in San Francisco. It was the Presidio and Ghirardelli chocolates and a famous bookstore (City Lights), and lunch in Chinatown.

It was a brick Civil War fort (Fort Point) that sits literally in the shadow of the aforementioned Golden Gate, because a Civil War nerd is always going to find something period.

Then it was up I-5 through laid-back Oregon and into Washington and the wild beauty of Olympic National Park, and on to Seattle -- the Park Place Market and the Space Needle and beautiful weather, and the jarring contrast between all that touristy stuff and the unhoused and mentally ill crouched in the doorways of the swankiest places in town. They shuffle past you, lost in their own tormented worlds, whispering or mumbling or screaming at the voices that live inside their heads -- and from which there is no relief, because our health care system leaves out the "care" part far too often.

Where you gonna go for help, after all, when help demands a profit and you have nothing to plump up its bottom line?

And so in retrospect, I suppose there is an Other in America, and these poor souls are it. Just trying to get by, like all of us -- and failing at it because not enough of us care enough, or our own trying-to-get-by exhausts us.

People get lost in our America, and that's another home truth of it. There is beauty here and wonder, a marvelous diversity and that common striving that makes it work. And, yes, there is ugliness here and sadness, too, because no place is utopia and thus will it ever be. 

"OK, enough 'What I Did On My Summer Vacation'," you're saying now. "Time to get back to your usual crap,"

As you wish.