I’ve been struggling for a very long time to come up with the right words to express something very important to me. And I now find them - or something very close to them -buried in Paul Krugman’s first blog post:

Since the late 1970s the America I knew has unraveled.

Perspective: I was born in 1951. So this unraveling began in my 20’s.

This brings up some other important concepts. Some of this unraveling is due to external realities - the massive changes in the influential forces at work and people in America. Some of it is due to the inevitable internal changes in myself - yet even more education and the opening of my eyes to the dirt behind the America I thought I knew. Of course, the dirt doesn’t annul the good things I saw in my America.

Johnnie Moore pointed out yesterday how easy it is to adopt a behavior and make it into an identity, or a persona. He uses the following 20-second video clip from Fight Club - in which Brad Pitt makes an insanely deft and complex observation - to illustrate his point.

It’s just as easy to adopt a perception of your country - just remember that it’s a selective perception and not an absolute.

But my image of America - the one that became unraveled - works for me. I claim it. I own it. And I’ll keep fighting for its ideals.