U.S. Route 30 hits me in the heart.

It's not lost on me the irony of Gettysburg and the attack on the U.S. on September 11, 2001 and their deadly ideological connection. I've also noticed a connection between Gettysburg and Stoystown, the location of the Flight 93 crash and Memorial location.  U.S. Route 30 and time connects both of those places. While the road started taking shape in the 1920s long after the Abraham Lincoln was the president, it was named the Lincoln Highway and became America's first transcontinental paved highway. You can look that up if you want the citation. It's real. 

I was in Gettysburg over the weekend. I've toured the battlefield in the past and am deeply moved by it. It's so hard to imagine fighting groups in the streets right where you live. And that whether you're fighting on one side or another, one would guess that noticing how your actions impact the people, animals, and buildings around you would change your actions, your trajectory.  Maybe they did in 1863, I don't know. I just know that walking around the battlefield causes me to question actions and decisions and how they affect my community. Anyway, this past weekend, I stayed in Hanover for my event because Gettysburg has gotten expensive! On my way from Hanover to Gettysburg, driving along Hanover Road, I came across some monuments facing the roadway, so, early on a Sunday morning, I stopped to check them out. Turns out it was the entrance to an entire historic area called the East Cavalry Field. I drove through it slowly, reading all the plaques and stepping out to check out General Custer's monument, and his humorous (to me) exclamation "COME ON YOU WOLVERINES!". The monuments marking the locations of significant actions were in and among the farmed bean fields. These 160 year old events alongside the rhythm of continuing life. Seriously, a farmer is driving a bean planter within mere feet of these historic monuments...  What is he or she thinking?  Shouldn't life here just *stop* in reverence to the death that occurred there?  I simply can not imagine how, in 1863, the family that lived on the farm that I can see down the way, coped with the damage and bodies of humans and horses all over their planted fields during the height of growing season. 

I continued on to the Gettysburg Museum and Visitor Center and the experience there was much the same as at East Cavalry Field. The short movie shown puts the Civil War conflict into perspective and the "cellar experience" drives home what the residents of the area dealt with. Just....head spinning. After a couple of hours here, I started driving west. I knew I wanted to stop at the Flight 93 Memorial after I stumbled over it on the way out to Gettysburg thanks to a sign along I76. They closed at 5 and it's not quite three hours from Gettysburg to the Memorial.

This brings me to U.S. 30. To get from Gettysburg to the Flight 93 Memorial, simply take U.S. 30 west. The route runs through the center of Gettysburg and it's about 2 miles north of where President Lincoln gave the Gettysburg address. Two and a half hours west, U.S. Route 30 is about (a little over) 2 miles north of the Flight 93 crash site, in Stoystown. Another '30' came into play yesterday when my distant cousin, Treat Williams, was killed in a motorcycle crash on Vermont Route 30. We share some ancestors, including Robert Treat, one of the founders of the states of New York and New Jersey.  Yes, Vermont Route 30 is not the same as U.S. Route 30 but it is another '30'. Makes me stop and wonder....

The thing about the two "bigger" events being connected by the Lincoln Highway holds my obsessive thinking. The Civil War was sparked by a clash in ideology: free men versus enslaved men. (I'm not even going to get into the female element right now.) The north vs the south. A battle of economics. And to me, the first intercontinental paved roadway is completely symbolizes the development of the American ideology of capitalism and economy, many times to the detriment of humanity. 

Abraham Lincoln's thinking in 1860 was such a shift in public ideology (I say 'public' because lots of others began feeling this way in their own lives) and, in my opinion, a progressive jump in the wokeness of the way American society of the time measured the value of people. The attack on the United States in 2001 was another clash of ideology. The ideology of al-Qaeda and their desire to have the world be what they want against the West, whose society ideals is, at its heart, the antithesis of al-Qaeda's.  I'm sure that, in 1860, the south thought their economic system was completely incompatible with the idea of free labor as much as 2001's al-Qaeda believes their religious values are incompatible with free thinking. We can even move forward in time to 2023's right-wing believers that LGBTQ+'s ideology is the antithesis of "decent" society. It seems like the straws keep getting shorter as excuses for fighting 'the other side' get more and more convoluted because they just want to fight the other side. They just want to fight.

Each side is willing to fight to the death to defend their thinking. I truly believe that there is a right and wrong on some issues but there is only a spectrum of rightness on most others. We don't ask the other side why they think what they think, with a quiet voice and open mind, because we don't want to understand. We are afraid they will change our mind. We don't only want to be responsible for our own selves and beliefs without imposing our thinking on others because we don't want that responsibility. We want society around us to be like us so we, ourselves, don't have to work to so hard to keep our own straight and narrow path.  It's too hard not to be swayed.  It's as if, and follow my use of a Jewish phrase here, our rigid fence around a rigid fence, plops down on top of and through others' fences.

Our American side, at least, will not change because history is hard. The U.S. Government has ceased investing in schools and leaving it up to states, who also don't want to invest in schools. Those leaders who don't want to be responsible for their own thinking, don't want to invest in good education because it will cause their thinking to become antiquated and irrelevant. Real education will smother their "cause".  Lack of real history education might make the oppressed side feel bad but it doesn't cause fear. Lack of real information causes fear and stupid decisions.

And so that fear leads ultimately to death -death when no one will find understanding that protects individual humanity and trust that the individual humanity can be responsible to itself and its community. 

I don't know if any of that makes sense.  In the moment of waiting for a gust of wind to sound the Tower of Voices amongst the noisy songbirds in the field near the Flight 93 Memorial, it seemed to make sense to me. I don't think any of this is revolutionary in thought, but it's what I thought, then.