America is Warmer than we Think

Summary: This article is my love letter to America.

It’s my thank you for making this lifetime my favorite one to date. It’s about the people who leave the world warmer than they found it, in a series of stories delivered through nine brief narratives of things I’ve witnessed and experienced in my short life.

And I mean warmer in the sense that there are still millions of people, objects, skills, relationships, and opportunities radiating usable heat if you know how to recognize, activate, and connect them, provided one can relearn how to behold the world from a fresh perspective: what my grandparents and their siblings called the old ways.

This short article serves as an index, weaving eight related articles into a single theme: what kind of people create a place where ordinary life feels warm?

• Industrial heat: 17 million Dodge Caravans

  • Q: How much civilization can you buy for $1,500?

• Cultural warmth: the one-of-a-kind heirloom

  • Q: How do another family’s memories become part of your story?

• Relational fire: the elders are still among us

  • Q: Who taught the person who taught you?

• Communal hearth: how Isaac earned the name “Eisenhower”

  • Q: What happens when a village helps raise your child?

• Civic glow: ordinary people authoring their future

  • Q: Who gave citizens permission to build extraordinary things?

• A passionate spirit of practicality

  • Q: When did knowing how to help become a form of wealth?

• Kindling

  • Leave one place warmer than you found it

• A glimmer

  • And once you see it you’ll never stop seeing it

• The afterglow

  • the future feels different when you know where warmth comes from

I don’t care what the radicals say, but revolution isn’t the future, at least not as they imagine it. The future doesn’t begin by inventing a wholly-new culture - that’s ridiculous:

Why throw the baby out with the bathwater?

The future begins by remembering the warmth that has been here all along, and deciding to tend the fire together.

This series serves as my love letter to the ordinary Americans whose accumulated competence, generosity, initiative-taking, and care make America feel warm, but without ever asking for recognition, repayment, or reciprocity.

This series talks about invisible heroes like:

• the engineers who designed the transmission

• the family that preserved the heirloom

• the tile guy who taught me the art of masonry

• the businessmen and women who mentored a teenager

• the kids reclaiming their city by mixing concrete under the Burnside Bridge

• the parking lot mechanics who stop what they’re doing to help a stranger

None of them are famous, yet all of them become protagonists in the same story, which begins with an anecdote about what I like to call industrial heat as I ask “how much civilization can you buy for $1,500?”