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blue bits. red rocks.
Friday 12 March 2010

America in the late nineteenth century was a society without a core. It lacked those national centers of authority and information which might have given order to such swift changes. American institutions were still oriented toward a community life where family and church, education and press, professions and government, all largely found their meaning by the way they fit one with another inside a town or a detached portion of the a city. As men ranged farther and farther from their communities, they tried desperately to understand the larger world in terms of their small, familiar environment they tried, in other words, to impose the known upon the unknown, to master an impersonal world through the customs of a personal society. They failed, usually without recognizing why; and that failure to comprehend a society they were helping to make contained the essence of the nation’s story. Glenn Beck: Man of the Seventies

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