Merle Miller said there are two kinds of people, those who stay home and those who leave. I might add a corollary that there are two kinds of those who leave, the ones running away from something and the ones running to something.

But no matter whether you stay or go, run to escape or run to discover, it’s questionable whether you can ever leave your home behind. Mark Twain in India, full of years and fame, said, “ All the me in me is in a little Missouri village halfway around the world.”

Jane Smiley, in a recent piece in “Smithsonian” about Grant Wood’s Iowa, says, “What we see in our first decade makes strong impressions that influence us for the rest of our lives…everything we once knew remains in our memory — the tiny yard that looked huge, the seven-step staircase to the front porch that seemed impossible to climb. There is an eternal fascination with those locations that we knew before we gained perspective.”

I have lived more that half my life far away from where I began, but still feel like a stranger in a strange land. And it is not just different folkways, accents, enthusiasms, but something more visceral or sensual. The shape of the land itself, the trees that are not the trees that sheltered me in my earliest days, the seasons with their different durations and slants of light are odd. The architecture of the homes and schools and downtown are related, of the same genus but a different species. It is the look, the smell, the taste, that is subtly different.

Though I was an English major, when I finally got to visit the land of Austen, Trollope, Marvell, Herrick, I did not immediately warm to the place. Yet in France I felt, an immediate, pleasurable deja vu. It took me years to realize that those small, provincial towns with a river through the middle, soft air under colonnades of trees, the shop of butcher and baker were an echo of that small town, on a rocky river, where I was young.

The actual town where I grew up is actually on a stream called the Rocky River. It is greatly changed from when I was young there, now a suburb of the nearby city that is reached in twenty minutes by a superhighway surrounded by big box retailers and fast food restaurants. In my day, that acreage was the Rosbaugh farms where we bought summer sweet corn from a roadside stand. They really did pave paradise and put up a parking lot.

So many of the ugly family feuds of our national political conversation since
World War II have been about change, pro and con. Rational discussion of its inevitability is in short supply because it does not address the human longing for the way we were, the days that are no more. Republicans have been very adept at exploiting backward-looking nostalgia by blaming change on scapegoats. Democrats have been remarkably tone-deaf to the natural reluctance to abandon a fondly, if rose-colored, remembrance of a past or passing way of life, an understandable anxiety about an unknown, possibly alien and disruptive future.

Such polarization makes impossible a debate we need to have, about which traditions to conserve and which to let go, what change to fear and what to welcome. All of us want to keep some things permanent and sacrosanct. Tree huggers want to conserve a vanishing landscape and its biodiversity. Gun nuts want to shoot for sport what their ancestors hunted for game. We all want cheap goods and energy, but are we willing to pay the cost in befouled air and water?

Coal miners and steel workers want their booming industries back, perhaps less for the actual labor than for the reliability of a living wage. Newspaper reporters and editors feel their pain, having been disrupted by the same technical revolution that makes almost all jobs provisional, and possibly obsolete.

We are all sad for our loses, alarmed by impermanence, and want to preserve some of what was good and safe and true. But being a Luddite or in permanent mourning for the Lost Cause, is no solution. Blaming scapegoats for the flux won’t turn back the clock. Refusing to confront the inevitability of change won’t get you a vote in what shape the future takes.

I number indentured servants mariners, pig farmers, brick makers, blacksmiths, tanners, axe makers, blast furnace puddlers, seamstresses, silk mill weavers, schoolmarms, firemen, telegraphers, gas station owners, secretaries, punch press operators, among my forebears. My daughter works for an airline, my son for a biotech company, his boys someday, no doubt, for enterprises we cannot imagine.

Our ancestors endured the uprooting required to come here, revolution, wars, booms and busts, floods and droughts without any social safety net, medical care, workplace safety rules. We know from estate records many died with fewer possessions than clutter our hall closet or garage, an axe, some farm tools, some crockery, a few sticks of furniture.

My parents are gone and so is the small town and the rust belt city adjacent as I knew them. You really can’t go home again, nor stand athwart history saying stop. We will all be forced to go wth the rocky river’s flow. But we can try to hand down to the next generations a Constitution, equal justice under law, e pluribus unum, civil rights, and all that.

Too many of us seem intent on handing down grievance, resentment, invidious comparisons, hatred of the other, and a refusal to compromise, to tear down instead of build up. Better to celebrate American ideals, including reinvention. After enduring plenty of bangs, are we really going to be undone by divisive whimpering? Shame on us.

I leave you with the closing lyrics of “Norma Rae: “It goes like it goes like the river flows, and time keeps rolling on, and maybe what’s good gets a little bit better, and maybe what’s bad gets gone.”