Returning to the US, former BBC North America editor Justin Webb is perplexed by a gun ownership surge in his old crime-free neighbourhood, where people leave front doors unlocked.
I cannot remember which year it was exactly, but I know where I experienced the happiest moment of my life.
We had been for a family day out on the coast of Delaware, a couple of hours' drive from Washington, and we were coming home, tired and sand-flecked, in our huge American car.
The children were singing along to country music - Jolene by Dolly Parton, again and again and again.
JUSTIN WEBB IN THE US
Checking out of 'Hotel America'
Has Obama made his first blunder?
The greatest political show on earth
America's 'safety catch'
BBC Blog: Justin Webb's America
The traffic was heavy, but unstressed as American traffic often is. All the cars moving together at about 50mph (80km/h), nobody was trying to go any faster.
We had just come over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which is one of the great sights of the nation.
More than 3.5 miles (6km) long, it yields views up and down the water at boats that bob far, far below you.
I do not know why it suddenly hit me, but it did - a sense of enormous gratitude is probably the best way to describe it, that my children were growing up in this benign, decent place.
A parallel universe
Years later on this brief visit to America I did not make it to the Bay Bridge, but I did go back to our old house.
Lots of us move house, but when the move is a move across continents as well - a move across cultures - the sense of loss can be profound.
Our little blue-painted wooden house is still there
Our little blue-painted wooden house is still there, the porch still has white chairs (did we leave them behind?), but it is in a parallel universe. A better universe?
I must say I thought so when I lived here.
Being a foreign correspondent is an odd business.
Sending reporters to live in far-off places is - deliberately - an experimental exercise in which people bond or do not bond with the country they are in, fight with the local bureaucracy, make friends or fail to make friends, have good days and bad, have children, suffer bereavement.
The mixture of all of that, and an effort to provide an impartial assessment of a place, is what makes it worthwhile, worth the cost and, it is to be hoped, worth listening to.
It is not, of course, that you impose your emotional state day-to-day on the story of the nation you are reporting. That would be a little wearing, would it not - but it seeps, as it should, into all that you say.
Generally we loved America and generally my coverage of it was sympathetic.
But to those who wrote and said "you've gone native", I have a partial confession to make: I understand better now that a little separateness can also provide insight.
Kind of madness
A case in point is our house, or rather our neighbourhood.
During my time here, I always felt that the British obsession with American gun crime was overblown.
Guns are part of America and most gun owners here are decent, peaceful people.
But here is an uncomfortable fact. My former house has the zip code 20016. I discover now that, since the Supreme Court relaxed gun ownership laws in Washington, one zipcode above all others has accounted for a surge in gun-buying: 20016.
This feels to me like a kind of madness.
When I called on the neighbours this week, I pushed open their front door. They would not have thought to lock it.
20016 is one of the safest places to live in the world. Sometimes someone parks a car facing the wrong way. (You are meant to park facing the direction of traffic.) But this is just about the limit of local criminality.
Nobody who has bought a gun in 20016 can possibly have done it out of a rational belief that he or she was reducing the risk of being attacked. So why did they?
The reason is deeper and it seems to me - with my newfound detachment - worrying.
Americans have long convinced themselves that there is a link between guns and overall freedom. The more guns there are in the hands of individuals, the more difficult it would be for a dictator to take power.
This is the freedom guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1791.
They argue about the meaning of the wording but not over whether this thinking still makes sense in the modern age.
And yet this week they watched a dictator overthrown in Egypt - with no recourse to violence.
The link in American minds between guns and freedom is, you could argue, proved by the events of yesterday to be deeply irrational.
So the debate about whether President Obama moves now to the centre-ground is at least in part irrelevant - this remains a nation unable to address sensibly the deepest questions - including guns but including plenty else as well.
Funnily, I never worried much about that when I lived here. I was too busy gazing out from the Bay Bridge, bathed in sunlight.
Perhaps that is America's problem, too many opportunities to avoid the hard questions. Can this contentment last forever? When I lived here, I thought it could. Now, just visiting, I wonder.
No comments:
Post a Comment