My Journey to the Land Of Cheese

I'm writing this from Wisconsin, where I've traveled to work on get out the vote efforts. So far it's included lots of phone banking along with a little leaflet-handing-out and a lot of cheese-sampling. The cheese-sampling wasn't directly related to getting out the vote, but, you know, when in Rome.

This is one of the most beautiful passages of writing about America I've ever come across. It's from the non-fiction book Family by Ian Frazier. Frazier wrote Family after his parents' deaths; it's about the intertwining of his family tree and American history.

From Family by Ian Frazier, p. 347-8

... everyone believes in something; a lot of us just don't know what that something is. And if you don't know what you believe, someone will always be glad to tell you. At the moment we are being told -- by advertising, and by the powers that can pay for it -- that we mainly believe in fear and greed.

A meaning I discovered among the relics in my parents' apartment is that meaning exists, but you have to look for it. Or rather, you must look for it, we are all obliged to look for it. Of all Stonewall Jackson's beliefs, the one I could subscribe to most easily is that keeping the Sabbath is important -- not in the sense you must never mail a letter on Sunday, but in the sense that every person should spend a certain amount of time thinking about what he or she believes. Because what you really believe in coincides with meaning a larger sense, with meaning that connects to other people alive and dead and yet to be born. And the belief is there inside you, just like your preference for certain foods or music or hobbies, but deeper. You have to know what it is because, first, if you don't someone else will enlist you in what they believe, and the next thing you know you've spent your life participating in confusion; and, second, because one day children, yours or someone else's, will ask what you believe, and if you don't know, that just leaves them more to figure out for themselves and less to react against or accept, and they'll have to unearth your beliefs before they can get started on their own. They might just take the short route and assume that our fear-and-greed advertising expressed all, in the deepest sense, we had inside us; and they might not be wrong.

From the beginning, America was an aspiration; and against odds, the aspiration is still out there. The people who founded this country came from a tradition of thinking about God and man and about how people best should live, a tradition more passionate then than it became or is today. And if the founding words about freedom and justice and equality were traduced the moment they came out of the speakers' mouths, traduced by crimes against people unlike the speakers themselves, still no fact of history tells us we cannot believe the aspiration. The words could not be unsaid; the aspiration, once brought into existence, existed. Because the country was based on it, the country could go beyond boundaries, could live in the minds of people far away. Its aspiration was set at large in the world. The dream of this country came from somewhere and is going somewhere. We came from somewhere and are going somewhere. We must pursue.