My two Americas

Sam Smith – Growing up in a comfortable and well-situated family I was first introduced to the real division in American culture when I was 12 years old - stuffing envelopes in a campaign that ended 68 years of Republican rule in Philadelphia. It was my first political event and the first occasion when I was directed by black and labor union guys.

I had no idea that I had been introduced to what I would come to regard as the two Americas: one consisting of the wealthy and powerful and the other represented by neighborhoods, communities and real people.  I would live in DC as an adult for over four decades and soon found myself not only with powerful national political figures but also with a  black community that would rise to over 70 percent of the population. In the early 1960s I started a neighborhood newspaper within blocks of the Capitol building, in a community that  would also include two of the city’s major 1968 riot strips. In my 20s I was helping the black activist Marion Barry make some headway, while living in a  multicultural city whose local stories were largely ignored by the mainstream media. And in my first job at WWDC, an all news radio station, I could expect to cover a presidential press conference on the same day as a fire or a murder.

The current lack of interest in the highly varied communities that truly characterize America is an important reason why the country does not work better these days. We have come to accept a nation divided by great economic and cultural differences with many not even trying much to deal with it. Fortunately, I was an anthropology major in college and learned to see it differently.

One of the factors that is seldom discussed, for example,  is how television helped to remove community from our lives. These days we  give less importance to  our neighborhoods and more to  the figures who  appear on TV.  I initially noticed this in part because my father was in the pre-television New Deal administration and my parents, by the time I was nine, had started an organic farm in Maine. I was raised to function in communities as well as sitting before a screen. But it is telling that when I think of my parents one  the images that quickly comes forth is the television set in their bedroom. 

Because I had a brother and four sisters, I learned in early childhood that the rest of the world wasn’t like me. I had other experiences such as playing in bands for decades. Playing in a band includes your solo but most of the time you are backing someone else up.

For seven years I also went to a Quaker school. Its message to others included this:

Germantown Friends is a Quaker school …. Friends, of course, have no exclusive claim to those principles which inform our school, but out of Friends' faith and practice, with its belief that there is that of God in everyone, flow simplicity, self-discipline, honesty, community responsibility, non-violent resolution of differences, and unreserved respect for every individual. We must constantly affirm these principles, teach them, and protect them.

I recently asked some friends and relatives who had gone to GFS: if they had to choose between their college and their high school, which would they pick and all said Germantown Friends. I had gone to Harvard and agreed.

Throughout my journalism career I have willingly covered both the national and the local (I even have a Maine blog). My view of America is that it is run much like a household with bossy and ambitious parents. We are the children in a national family run by people like Donald Trump but we can still create a mutual life with others that is kind, fair and fun. Our problems remain but a lifestyle blended with others keeps us smiling and doing good things.

The crooked, selfish and mean powerful are like the weather.  We have to live with them but not let them define us.