It's hard to export what America has become

By CARL HEINTZE

Now and then, I wonder why I'm here, how I got here and why I'm so lucky.

To have been born in California, to have been born in the United States, to have lived almost all of my life in both places, is indeed the best of all known worlds. With this sudden rush of chauvinism, I also feel an overwhelming sense of patriotism.

I know patriotism is unfashionable in these cynical days, but I can't help it. I can't help admiring the system of government, the land and the people who have made it possible to live so well for so long. The peculiar circumstances which sent our founders across the ocean in search of a better place to live, the coming together of the political philosophies upon which the Republic was founded, the happy isolation which allowed our forefathers to nourish it even as they spread westward, the coming together of so many diverse peoples into one, for all these, I'm immensely thankful.

And I think of myself as a living example of all this, of the wonderful fate which made us. For by what peculiar chance did a couple of German refugees flee Old World conscription for an uncertain future in Pennsylvania in the first third of the 19th century? By what happenstance did my grandmother struggle to cross the Atlantic from Norway and my grandfather the Isthmus of Panama from New England to reach California? And why did my father, a rolling stone if there ever was one, decide to rest here and to marry and raise a family in California, what was then a place about which many had heard, but few had seen?

By all these odd circumstances, no stranger probably than anyone else's, I am who I am and I live where I do.

Oh, I know that the journey to this time and this place has not been that easy for others. For the Native Americans who were here before recorded history, my coming seems an insult and a trespass. And for the descendants of slaves who endured a passage of horror to this continent, it has been a long, uphill struggle against inequality.

But discounting these disasters are their descendants not better off now than they would have been had their great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers remained as nomads of the plains or as children of Africa? I cannot think so.

I cannot believe other than that we are all among the most fortunate of peoples, that there are few among us who would willingly return to the land of their ancestors now or at any time in the past.

For all of us, America has become the Great Experiment, the living laboratory in which we continually test new ways in which to live together. These efforts at community do not always work, but even when they do not, they are better than the alternatives.

For those of us who live in California, land, climate and coming together has been blessed, else why would so many arrive here now and then from the East? There is no other state quite like it. It is a continuing amusement to see those who were not born here find it out for themselves. For them, as for myself, we have come to the best place in the best time in history.

I get this feeling every time I leave our borders to go to another country, even to Canada. I am not home while I am away. I am home when I return, and when I return I experience again that feeling of relief, that sense of relief and freedom, that of joy of knowing I am back in the best place I could be, that I am where comfort, peace and understanding, the best of the world remains.

I have this sense even though I know much is not right with my country, that there is too much traffic, too much greed, too little understanding, too much division, too little concern for the land, the air, the water and the very things which make it so wonderful to be an American and a Californian. Yet I know we are trying. We're seeking to keep it as it was.

I enjoy all this with immense thanks, but also sometimes with an unease. For I know that much of the rest of the world, peering in from the outside, is envious and would like to share it, would like both to be here and at the same time to take away what we have.

For them I have no easy answer. It does not seem to me that America is either easy or readily exportable. It is a way of life which depends not only on place, but on all those ingredients which have gone into its making.

So I cherish these. I hope my children and their children cherish them as well. For those others who would live likewise, I can only add that America is a hard-won prize, a time and a place which can be a model, but which cannot be stolen.

Sheriff's Report

It's hard to export what America has become

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