History in company

When I was a child in the 1950s, you would sometimes still see a newsreel in the theater, wedged between the previews and the cartoon. Television was still a baby, and video news was something consumed in company. Today, it is only the truly dire, or the truly monumental, that brings unrelated people together around a TV. I can count the occasions on my fingers: 1963, at school, as the events in Dallas unfolded; 1969, in the lounge of a South Dakota dude ranch, to watch the moon landing; 1974, at the commune, watching Nixon resign; 1986, at work, as the Challenger exploded; 2001, in the Satellite Room of the NCPR studio, as the World Trade Center fell; and Tuesday, back in the Sat Room, to watch an African American take the oath of office as president.

It is the last two that keep coming back to mind--maybe because I was in the same place with the same people. The occasions seem to be bookends, bracketing an era. After each, I found it necessary to walk by myself--after 9-11, to walk off the evil, and after the Inauguration, to savor relief and gratitude. As political happenings, they also bookend the spectrum--suicidal and murderous intimidation contrasted with peaceful transformation, one appealing to the tribal divide, and one to the common impulse toward mutual progress.

While each of the occasions listed above mark history for good or ill, I have to believe the most momentous is the most recent. An America that can embrace its diversity, rather than merely tolerate it, is a nation not only new to itself, but something new in the history of nations. And such a rebuke to the politics of fear.