Blog No 5 What Makes America Great
My wife, Michele, and I returned from an extended trip to Italy and Vienna where we experienced art and history to the degree not possible in our country, whether seeing an opera in the venerated Teatro de Scala in Milan, the magnificent St. Stephen’s Cathedral from our hotel window in Vienna, or hearing musicians dressed in period costumes playing Mozart in a small auditorium that Mozart lived in for brief time. The splendid Duomos of Milan and Florence, the fascinating medieval hilltop villages of Assisi and Orvieto, have no counterpart in our country. Rome’s Colosseum is a textbook of antiquity and marvelous engineering, but one must not forget that the audience that flocked to this stadium over the centuries demanded that that blood be spilled from gladiators and wild animals. Gladiators specialized in killing lions, tigers and many other animals, so many animals slaughtered that their numbers became scarce.*
But what we have in our country that is exceptional, if we can keep it, is the inheritance of Western enlightenment that made our Constitution possible, giving us freedom and liberty not seen before. America also excels in our great outdoors, the Grand Canyon, the vast mountain ranges of Alaska, over 60 national parks and splendid national forest lands that no longer exist elsewhere.
Growing up on a farm in the Ozarks, my younger brothers and I learned from an early age to value the outdoors by birdwatching, exploring caves, finding arrowheads, and sleeping in our treehouse. This was during the time of acid rain and the diminishing ozone layer, before the warming of our planet. We discovered that predators play an important role in all living things. We turned from trapping predators to calling for their protection―much to the consternation of our community. My brother and I wrote a letter to the Harrison Daily Times protesting the construction of a dam on the Buffalo River that was being planned by the Army Corp of Engineers. Damming rivers was a part of the Army Corp of Engineer's DNA, no less than that of beavers, although the dams that beavers create are important to prevent flooding and droughts, and enhance biodiversity― something we have learned only recently. The Buffalo River was among the first rivers to be designated as a Wild and Scenic River.
Our college and medical school friends formed an all-male annual canoe and camping trip, that began on the Buffalo River but soon involved other rivers in the Ozarks. Later we branched out to the Rio Grande, the Green River in Utah, the Missouri in Montana, and the Niobrara in Nebraska. Lately we have been making canoe trips to the pristine Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota on the Canadian border, maintaining the tradition for over 40 years.
Over the years I have voted for the party that valued preserving our natural environment. Denying climate change is no longer tenable and defies all empirical evidence. There are many important causes to be involved in, but I believe protecting our planet is among the most consequential, especially for future generations.
* The Colosseum: a History by Robert B. Abrams
