How has the country changed during your lifetime?

A lot, and much of it not for the better.

The most noticeable changes are improved economic circumstances and loss of mutuality—the communal sense of what it means to be American. 

We are, as a nation and as individuals, richer than ever. We live longer, we travel more often and more widely, information (and the power it brings) is easier to get, we live in better homes, drive better cars, and our universities and health care science are the envy of the world. 

The list is long, but I’d trade it all to regain the world I remember growing up in Sulphur Springs. It was made by our parents and grandparents. They were unabashedly patriotic, not in the jingoistic sense gripping much of the electorate these days, but with a bone-deep belief that America was, and is, the hope of the world. They knew America was something new under the historical sun and they were willing to sacrifice blood and treasure to establish and defend it. Thomas Paine put it best in 1776 in Common Sense, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” They had a clean slate, world-class philosophical insight, abundant common sense, and they had courage and will. Pragmatic philosophers, these folks. And so they braved the odds and established a Republic designed to resist the intrigues and folly of the powerful.

We owe it to them to be faithful to their sacrifice. Madison, Jay, Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, and Robert Morris maneuvered more familiar names, especially Washington, to support the creation of a new Constitution to replace the failed Articles of Confederation. They designed government by gridlock and dispersed interests—tripartite separation of federal powers, of church and state, and of federal and local, the voter disproportionate senate, and other little-appreciated devices, are their gift and our heritage. Yes, it’s messy, but it is our salvation. I sleep better with faith in our Constitution as the ultimate guard of our freedom to be different. 

But as much as I might wish otherwise, those documents have not preserved the Founding Culture. We have lost our unity, our purposeful spirit to be the best of all nations. There is too much “me” and not enough “we.” We have lost sight of the common good, of civility and compromise.

We brim with righteous indignation, forgetting our bonds of history, aspirations, and spilled blood. We are divided into warring clans defined by differences in religion, color, language, ethnicity, class, and culture. We have become tribal, each clan facing the warm glow of the campfire of tribal truth and myth, beating drums of war and chanting songs of retribution against rivals gathered around their own fires flickering in the distance. In the meantime, crops go to seed and the wolf stands at the edge of the light. For all of his faults, the late Rodney King got it right: “Can’t we all just get along.”

We must regather around a common campfire. I yearn for someone, anyone, on the national stage who will call upon our “better angels.” But no one dares. The tribal bonds are too strong.

I am, despite it all, an optimist. My hope lies in the sentiment expressed by Mr. Lincoln in his first inaugural address: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

I am proud to be an American, to have worn the uniform, and to have contributed my mite to the common good.