What American Heritage?

**Just briefly, I would like to congratulate everyone on surviving the primary season here in Ohio, to those who are reading this in states that are yet to vote in their primaries, you have my sympathy.**

I was driving around today with friend today and we stopped in to see one of her friends and neighbors, who happen to be Amish.  I have no intention of discussing the Amish, their society, or their lifestyle, but I was given some food for thought from their heritage.  Their family is the basis of their communities and their way of life is passed generation to generation, they possess a living heritage that has stood the test of time.  This observation lead me to wonder about my own heritage, or lack their of.  What will my parents entrust to me, that I must maintain and pass to my children?

The obvious answer to the question is my family name and the history of that name.  I bear the great name of Campbell, with ties going back to the Scottish clan and rich history both in fame and infamy.  But certainly I will inherit more than a name.  I received a set of morals and beliefs, but those have shifted somewhat and are not the same that parents gave to me, and most assuredly the morals and beliefs I give to my children will shift in their lifetimes.  There must be something tangible to tie myself to those morals and beliefs, a place where I was taught right from wrong, a table where we learned to pray and eat.

I don’t want you to think that I am urging materialism, but try to teach a child about freedom, democracy, or other such abstract ideas. They will struggle to understand, because children don’t do abstract, they just haven’t matured enough for that, so we use objects to teach them to take care of things: teddy bears, plants, or pets.  But how do you teach a child that you care for the things that are old?  Certainly you would not just give a person a priceless object without first teaching them to care for it, a knife, a gun.  But with so little standing the test of time, there isn’t a lot to pass on.  I think this is as much a problem with our society’s sense of value.

I had a Scottish friend make an observation about America that I found quite astute, though she said it only in passing; America doesn’t have anything old.  I will jump right to the objection, yes we have government buildings, documents in museums, and pieces of art that have been preserved.  But what will pass to me personally to care for?  In the ‘Old World’ they seem to revere their ruins, they love what is old but don’t see in the point in preserving it, and one day it will be gone.  In America, we don’t even care that much for what was in a place last year, let alone a century ago.  Our cities are full of people who will comment on places as they drive, “That is where the old church sat,” or “That used to be Mr. Johnson’s farm.”  These narratives grate on our sense of progress, we often sit in the car with these people wishing they would just get with the times.

In America when something outlives its usefulness we tear it down and rebuild over it, trying to wipe it from the collective memory.  Buildings whose only fault was that they didn’t perfectly fit our purposes.  There is no reverence for the labor of those who built it, there is no respect for those who occupied it, and it just needs to be torn down.  More than preserving what comes from my father, I feel it important to preserve what comes to me from our collective past.  For our American Heritage is more than parchment in hermetically sealed containers or buildings maintained by taxes.  It is the places and the people who teach us who to care for and maintain our way of life.  It is the bits and bobs of a life we never lived that tell us the stories of those who came before and teach us how to live our own lives.

Perhaps our sense, as a society, of needing to find ourselves comes from this lack of instruction of who we are, hence, so much money spent trying to find ancestors whose names should be as sacred to us as Washington, Lee, or Patton.  There was some unspoken law passed that made it wrong to tell a child who they were, and explain it in such a way as to give them pride in who that was.  We went form a society that was putting men on the moon to one who spent their lives trying to figure out “who they really are.”  This is energy that could be better spent making actual progress like those who pioneered the last century.

In a world of eternal progress, please, stop and teach your children who they are, where they come from, and where they should go.  It does not benefit them to go and find themselves if they don’t know where that journey begins. We are all deserving of a proper heritage passed father to son, mother to daughter, generation to generation.  And Ideals, while important, need to grounded in the physical.