affected west looks at the turnpike that crosses
the state and wonders what’s headed its way.
And that’s only geography. Economic stress,
too, dictates whether an experience is shared:
Those isolating on a one-acre suburban
property are facing different days than their
fellow Americans in low-income housing
or 40-story apartment buildings. For the
homeless, living out a “quarantine” on the street
is hardly a unifying moment.
The shared experience is not on a shared
timeline, either. The saga is unfolding in very
different stages in New York City than in
Middlesboro, Kentucky or Coeur d’Alene, Idaho,
and that fact interrupts any shared experience
even if self-isolation connects it.
At its heart, all this is supposed to be a feature
of the United States, not a bug. There has always
been a push-pull between regional and national.
The notion of local and state identity coexisting
with overall Americanness was explicitly baked
into the country’s founding documents.
But big events, at least in the era of mass media,
have injected national experience everywhere.
During World War II, stories delivered to Americans
in newsreels, movies, network radio updates and
news agency dispatches in local papers shaped an
“American” view that saturated local ones.
That endured for decades as TV carried the nation
through the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam
War and the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-81.
Dominant voices like Walter Cronkite’s gave
Americans a “that’s the way it is” sensibility even
as many were having vastly different experiences.
Today, though, a media illusion of togetherness
— while comforting and useful in many