America's Frontiers

Americans are a restless people. We have never been ones to stay at home. Oh sure, there are some who cling to hearth and home, but they always seem to have bred a bunch of young ones who were ready to take off just about anywhere. The grass has always seemed greener almost anywhere, except where we are at.

Thus, we explored and exploited this vast continent in comparatively short order. By the time the Great Depression ended, we were spread throughout the Nation and, ever since, there has been something wrong. There is no place left to go, and that restless energy has been eating at us ever since.

There are places on Earth that are still unexplored but who among us has the funds to set up camp and roam Antarctica? Who among us can build the sort of craft necessary to ferret out the secrets of the Ocean Floors.

So, we turn inward. Artists write progressively strange tales, ultimately forgetting the tale in search of new technique. Painters revert to some neo-primitive exploration of shape and color. Musicians, having exhausted standard form, traffic in atonal music and electronic bleeps and squeaks.

Some explore the body and attempt to plumb the limits of strength and longevity with the use of steroids and growth hormones and a plethora of enzymes and neuro chemical boosters. Ultimately, they will seek to transcend the body by turning themselves into a hybrid of man and machine.

Still others turn to the spiritual, employing exotic meditations, shamanic trances, and vision quests involving a hell broth of chemicals. The marijuana, peyote, mushrooms, and LSD of my day have given way to way to a dizzying array of designer chemicals and trips to the Amazon in search of ayhuasca are a trendy new vacation choice.

All of these are but vain substitutes for the real thing, physical exploration. I thought, given the speed with which we answered JFK's challenge and reached the moon, that by now we would be leaving the Solar System and on our way to the stars. But, no. Just the other day, I saw a brief article stating that our planned trip to Mars was now off.

What can be done? Short of a new determination by our Government to invigorate our space program, unlikely since most in Government can't find their ass with both hands, all we can do is to look closer at what is here. Yes, we have explored our World, but often we did so hastily. Let us go back and look again. Odds are we have missed quite a bit and now we should be sufficiently mature to take our time.

I chuckle sometimes at the silly shows on History TV that feature people searching for, well you name it: UFOs, the Lost Dutchman Mine, the Treasure of Oak Island, giants, sea serpents, Big Foot, the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant, signs that the New World was visited by Egyptians, Chinese, Phoenicians, the Irish and/or the Polynesians. Is there anything to these weird stories? Sure, probably something is behind these persistent stories, but it does not matter. What is important is the quest, the search, for in the search, we find ourselves.