America the Beautiful

The US is blessed with an abundance of breathtakingly beautiful nature: the Grand Canyon, Appalachia, the basin-and-range areas of New Mexico, the San Francisco Bay, just to mention a few. I had seen much of it as a child when my parents were on furlough in the US. So when I came to college, I had these beautiful vistas in mind.

I landed in Dallas and rode the bus out to New Mexico, where my grandmothers and some other relatives lived. To help pass the time, I bought a copy of Mad Magazine before boarding. Its featured article was "America the Beautiful." Of course, in its inimitably unsubtle style, it treated the reader to drawing after drawing of strip malls, outsize roadside advertising signs, auto junkyards, strip mines, smoggy cities, and litter-filled highways. The point was clear: our lack of aesthetic control over our construction and our carelessness about what we were doing to nature threatened the very beauty we so lustfully sing about.

As I watched the scenery go by outside the bus window, I noticed, to my horror, that every little bit an ugly blight such as those depicted in the magazine came into view. The problem may have been more in evidence in western Texas than in many other parts of the country owing to the lack of regulation and of woods to cover the warehouses, car dealerships, feedlots, and other unsightly results of our wasteful practices. Having come from one of the world-class cities known for its beauty, even though I also knew its bad areas and shanty towns, and having heard so often from so many lips how exceptional the US was, I arrived in Portales, New Mexico, in shock.

Having such a strong economy, a penchant for cleanliness, and a can-do mentality, how was it possible that such ugliness was allowed to accumulate? With time, I was able to come up with some, though certainly not all, the answers to that question. We were so convinced at the time of our exceptionalism, that we could not envision how things could be done better. We were already at the top, so how could we improve? It would be a waste of time and effort to try. The same outlook also meant that we never bothered to take a look at other countries: how they built cities, what they allowed and did not allow, what protections they afforded nature and their historical patrimony. We never considered that countries much older than ours may have something to teach us.

The assumption of our superiority is a strongly held cultural belief that affects us all do some degree. We are more open to other places than we used to be, but our country is so large and our economy so powerful that it is hard to look beyond our borders. All countries, as best I can tell, have cultural themes that affect them negatively and change very slowly if at all. Where I grew up in Argentina. for example, people are convinced that their country is inferior to North America and Europe, so convinced that they have never made a real effort to bring it to fulfill its potential. Every downturn in economy and every calamity that happens just reinforces this view. So we are not alone in the US by any means in being hampered by our cultural assumptions. That is the point: we have been a great country, yes, but we still are one of over 150 nations. It would help us to see ourselves as part of that world and not separate from it.