This Huge Country

When you look at a weather map of the nation, a couple of thoughts come to mind. First, how immense and spread out is America. Second, upon some slight reflection, you come to appreciate the tremendous regional differences and local varieties in ethnic groups, speech, religion, political preferences, etc. there are that constitute the make up of this great nation. And yet Americans are very similar in many ways, no matter where they hale from. A Latina rancher outside of Tucson is doing most of the same daily routines that a barber in Buffalo is going through as he carries out his daily duties and chores. They are family men, working and providing for their families, just in quite difference locales with local variations filtering in to the room's air. What am I deriving at here? What I wish to discover is how each citizen reconciles in his own mind how these opposing forces of cultural similarities versus cultural dissimilarities are harmonized in such a way as to make the resolution of such cognitive clashing a means to do something meaningful with his life. I was worried that each or most local yokels are ill-trained to undertake this balancing act between national sameness versus local uniqueness, between the big picture and the neighborhood perspective. Would most citizens lack the hunch, ken or yen to maverize, based up the intellectual narrative they composed for themselves, growing out of consideration of these conflicting forces? Ill-trained as most people are, they could not overcome the subjective hurdles bearing down on them, making it likely that each local would mishandle the overseeing of his duty to maverize. Everywhere the system conspires to churn out dunces, non-maverizers asleep while awake. The groupist machine grinds up people everyday and spits them out as truncated, debilitated human remnants. What people need is a Baedeker on maverizing, on how best to escape the clutches of local authorities, lulling the young to sleep, feeding on their solipsistic turning in, swaddled in collective illusions. They become so compliant, unimaginative, docile, incurious and listless that they no longer will suspect there is a difference between how they live here, and how others live over the hill, or in the next town, or in the next state. The handbook on maverizing, yet unwritten, but I am working on it, will explain to each willing individual how transcend local narrowness by blending what she is and knows from here with what is universal, other, foreign and objective out there. She loves the new and different, without accepting them as superior, good or worthy without reservation and close examination for flaws and catches. As a curious, rational moderate and truth-lover, she is educated enough, with judgment and resilience enough, to withstand the distressing, upsetting strain of new and diverse ideas bombarding her. She fights back successfully against local bullies seeking to draw her back into slavery and darkness by re-enslaving her. Their offer of lies, comfort, ease, popularity and a return to sleepiness are the unfortunate, malignant consequences of united, unhappy, unhelpful, local, subjective existing. She, the incipient maverizer, will turn in time to thrust what coming at her on its head. She will remain subjective, local and private, but grounded in her tradition but not destined by it. She breaks through to truth and objectivity, relating to and absorbing the universal and suggestions from other locales and localists without sickening on the instruction, or resenting it, or by abandoning her own tradition in embarrassment. She will grow up and out from her tradition, ever connected to it organically while maverizing to share her fresh vision and offerings for audiences populating objective reality out there, whether she goes and lives abroad, or spends her days residing next door to her mother.