This past week our family took a vacation through the New England states; I especially enjoyed the forests and tranquility of Vermont as well as a boat trip on Portland's harbor. With vacations it's always nice to get away and see things you don't get to see everyday, but after a week it was also nice to get home and sleep in my own bed last night and poop in my own toilet.
When we approached Boston, consciously or not a lot of our trip involved looking at stuff related to the Revolutionary War. We stopped first in Concord and Lexington, just west of Boston, where it could be said that the civil war started in April 1775. There we saw the places where 'the shot heard round the world' kicked off a series of events by which a bunch of diverse colonies united to claim independence and ultimately win it as well. We also saw some of the historic sights in Boston, as well as a few touristy ones like the Tea Party museum. It's a reminder that people suffered and sacrificed for the idea of a new nation, for liberty, for the ability to begin something very new. No matter how imperfect it was (I was expecting monitors from the Trump administration to be sniffing around to see how America-glorifying it was, which it wasn't always), these are things that should give Americans of all stripes a sense of pride.
A few days later we left Boston and drove to Newport, Rhode Island. Rhode Island is where Roger Williams fled in the 1630s when the freedom-seeking pilgrims of Massachusetts denied that freedom to others Rhode Island was found as a colony seeking a greater sense of religious liberty. Two and a half centuries later, however, Newport became known as the place where religiosity was easily swept aside in the name of rich people wanting a summer showplace built a series of mansions overlooking the ocean. It was the time of the 'gilded age' of the 1880s, a time where people (many of whom genuinely had worked hard; some had inherited wealth going back generations) had the wealth to lavishly show off their position in society. Many of the old mansions still today, though a lot of them are museums; a few now belong to a college I had never heard of before, Salve Regina University.
It struck me as we strolled along the cliff walk that bordered these homes and the ocean how this week had explained a lot of America. Our country was founded on a sense of freedom, however imperfect (ask the slaves, women, and indentured whites), but a century later was more about wealth and status in a way that might have embarrassed our English forbearers. It may well be that this is the eternal struggle of the United States, that the energy and passion that inspires true greatness inevitably leads to a form of greatness that is gilded and self-absorbed. Could it be that our human nature and our tendency to desire a legacy in the form of monuments leads us into a place where importance is only something that is bought?
