Well, for one thing, I aged ten years in the spaces between and on either end of those dots. In 1979, I turned 21; in 2019, I’ll turn 61. Forty years of good life in those spaces, with very little to complain about–personally speaking, of course.
I’ve thought a lot about 1979 lately, the summer of that year especially. In the spring, I was a music major at Mars Hill College, and I’d just qualified to enter the performance track. So, the fall semester would be a lot to look forward to. And it would be a lot of work. I’m not sure exactly when I realized that I didn’t have the dexterity to be a great flute player, but in the compressed timetable of memory, the realization probably came close behind the success of making the cut for a focus on performance.
Meanwhile, back at the homeplace in Walnut, my folks sold my uncle some pastureland. I’m not sure how much they received for it, but I know they set aside $5,000 to divide between my brother and me. He took his and used it to set himself up with a place to live when he graduated from NC State. I decided that I wanted to take mine early, like the proverbial Prodigal Son, and go to Europe, so I signed up for a MHC study-abroad summer program that would have me studying somewhere in England for six weeks or so, after which I would have another two weeks to travel some on my own.
But sometime in the middle of that spring semester, somebody from Brevard College came through putting up posters for tours conducted by a company called American-European Student Union, Inc. (AESU). Their tours were just short of eight weeks long promised to take me to seventeen countries. No study, just travel.
“That’s what I want to do,” I said. And that’s what I did.
I left home in the middle of June and joined AESU 616 (so named because our tour began on June 16) in London, England. Between then and the first days in August, we traveled on a Mercedes bus–some forty-eight college students, an Austrian tour guide not much older than we were, and an Italian bus driver.
This summer of 2019, about a dozen from the ’79 tour celebrated our 40th year of friendship in Sicily, about which I will have more to say in the next few weeks — and more to show with lovely pictures. I’ve long thought that the trip — with the reunion added — would make a good novel, so I’m some forty-five pages into such a beast. More on that later as well.
For now, I’m just going to point out that the summer of 1979 was when President Jimmy Carter recognized a “crisis of confidence” in the American people and described two possible paths for America. One was “the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves.” I feel certain that he wholeheartedly believed that we Americans would rise to the occasion, as we had done so often in the nation’s history.
But we didn’t. We disappointed President Carter and ourselves by taking the other path, which, in a speech given on 15 July 1979, he described this way:
One is a path . . . leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.
“A Crisis of Confidence”
Doesn’t that description seem unfortunately like the behavior that has brought us to July 2019 after culminating in results of the 2016 presidential election? (If interested, see Susan Delacourt’s “How Jimmy Carter Predicted Donald Trump — in 1979”).
The long downward slide from 1979 to 2019 began with Carter’s defeat and the election of a B-movie actor, then hit what I hope is rock bottom with the election of an ignorant and arrogant reality TV star and 3rd-rate stand-up-comedian wannabe. Compare, if you dare, President Carter’s speech referenced above to Trump’s attempt to commemorate Independence Day on 4 July 2019:
The Continental Army suffered a bitter winter of Valley Forge, found glory across the waters of the Delaware and seized victory from Cornwallis at Yorktown. Our Army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over airports, it did everything it had to do and at Ft. McHenry under the rocket’s red glare had nothing but victory. When dawn came, the star-spangled banner waved defiant.
Check out the cogent analysis of how the above might have come about.
I will now close my eyes and think of Sicily.