I remember a conversation I had with my grandmother in the last year or so before she died.
She was born in 1895 and lived until 1990, and amazing changes took place during her life. When she was born, the telephone and the electric light were still relatively new; most folks in small towns didn’t have either.
The very first automobiles were being built, but 99 percent of Americans hadn’t even seen one. Motion pictures were still a few years away, and radio and television, airplanes and computers, were still off on the distant horizon.
In her lifetime, men went to the moon.
I’m nowhere near 94 yet, but I’ve been thinking about the ways our country has changed since my own birth in 1949. Many of them aren’t as dramatic — planes fly faster, computers do more with less space, there are a lot more channels of television and things that weren’t portable are now.
But not all the changes have been positive ones; indeed, many of the things we would call “progress” have actually served to balkanize us and divide us from one another.
I always get a kick out of comedian Jeff Foxworthy talking about growing up in the ’50s and ’60s and saying kids had it tough because there were only three channels of television — ABC, CBS and NBC.
“And if the president was on, your evening was shot.”
Now there are hundreds of channels, on all the time, and a hit show is lucky to garner 20 percent of the audience. You can watch television for women (Lifetime), for kids (Nickleodeon), for guys (Spike), or for almost any interest group you can imagine.
So nobody watches the same show.
Nobody has the same frame of reference anymore.
But on January 19, 1953, 44 million Americans, nearly 72 percent of the audience, watched the episode of “I Love Lucy” in which she gave birth to her first child.
Think about it. Seventy-two percent of the audience. Super Bowls don’t draw that well; the Olympics or the Academy Awards would kill for that kind of viewership.
I started thinking about this when I watched the YouTube clip of Sarah Brightman singing on the Johnny Carson show in 1991. I can’t remember the last time I heard someone reference something that happened on late-night television, but there was a time when folks who were still awake at 11:30 p.m. tuned to NBC so they could at least hear Carson’s monologue before falling asleep.
Are we one country anymore? I don’t know. I’ve heard so much about red states and blue states that I’m starting to hate those colors. But we’re far more divided than that. We’re secular America and Christian America. We’re beer America and wine America. We’re meat America and vegetarian America.
And of course, the greatest division of them all, Trump America and non-Trump America.
Is there anything other than a 246-year-old idea that still holds us together?
I wonder.