The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened by Bill McKibben.

4/5 rating. 217 pages.

Book #16 of 2023. Read May 14, 2023.

This book talks about the three largest areas of change in America in the last 50 years: patriotism, religion, and consumerism.

We have had a large push to come to terms with the negative aspects of the American past: from slavery, to the genocide and removal of Native Americans. Bill talks beautifully about the importance of both taking these horrendous acts into our history about America, while not losing the positive aspects of community and a drive for a better country.

He then goes on to talk about the move away from religion and The Church more specifically. I loved his view on this! Bill is religious and therefore sees the positive aspects that come from communion and Jesus’s teachings of love, community, and solidarity with our fellow people. Meanwhile, he derides the negatives of racism, hypocrisy, bigotry and other ideas that have often lived – and thrived – in large religious organizations.

Finally, Bill moves onto the shift to more individualism and consumption. The shift towards a more Randian view on the world makes me really sad. Humanity has spent its entire history in community, relying on other people for both kindness and their livelihoods. The shift to the view of “screw other people” just can’t be the apex of this history. Bill does a great job of showing the importance of moving once again to a more communal view of our place in America and the world.

I loved this book. I thought overall it did a great job of being relatively even-handed with things – though there are places that if you are a staunch republican, I can understand some distaste on his political jabs. Bill believes that we need to invite people in to form positive change.

“[B]ecause that’s what good people do: open new chapters in the human history, ones that have some hope of redeeming what came before.”

Quotes:

“Sixty-two percent of Black kids born between 1955 and 1970 grew up in neighborhoods of high or medium poverty. For Black kids born since 1970, that number has grown to 66 percent.”

“To put this in easy to understand terms: my parents bought their house on Middle Street in 1970 for $30,000, which would be the rough equivalent of $205,000 in today’s dollars. But in fact, if you go on the real estate website Zillow and take a look, the house is actually now worth an estimated $987,000. That $800,000 over inflation is the premium that came from getting in near the ground floor and riding the suburbs up. The affluent American suburb may be the greatest accumulation engine of all time – at least until the financial crisis of 2008, a surefire guaranteed ride. But you had to be able to buy a ticket at the start: you needed that $30,000, or access to a bank that would lend it to you.”

“And the numbers are almost unbelievably stark: in 2014, for every dollar in a white household, a Black household had less that seven cents.”

“By the end of the 1950s, 98 percent of homes built with FHA support after World War II were occupied by white Americans.”

“The point, perhaps, is that there’s no significant gap between American history and religion up until about 1970, the hinge year of this book in so many ways. Americans were so overwhelmingly religious that it makes little sense to think of almost any development – good, bad, violent, peaceful, regressive, progressive – as separate from Christianity.”

“As [Martin Luther] King pointed out in his talk in Lexington in 1963, eleven o’clock on Sunday morning was the most segregated hour in America. ‘There is more integration in a side street tavern than a front street church,’ he said, and of course that segregation muffled and dampened the response to injustice.”

“In a very real sense this shift [to religious “nones”] makes for a healthier country: 65 percent of those ‘nones’ voted for Joe Biden in 2020, which is as close to a referendum on good moral sense as we’ll ever get.”

“As Robert Jones points out in White Too Long, the best way to predict how often a white evangelical will go to church is to know his score on an index of racial feelings (the more racist, the more hours in the pews).”

“Only 16 percent of young adults outside the faith said that Christianity ‘consistently shows love for other people.’ Considering the theoretical tenets of the faith (‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’), this is a failure of epic proportions.”

“In the personal Jesus paradigm, Jesus did not die for a cause or for humankind writ large but for each individual person.”

“But how terrible for you who are rich now; you have had your easy life.” – Bible passage following the beatitudes

“Only a quarter of Americans have managed to become friends with any of the their neighbors.”

“As Meg Jacobs wrote in her history of the period, by 1970, Americans consumed a third of the world’s energy – more than the Soviet Union, Britain, West Germany, and Japan combined. And mostly because of the car. By then there were 118 million cars and trucks on the American road – more than quadruple the number twenty years before. The cars were big: 20 percent bigger than they’d been just five years before.”

“February of 1985 was the last year in which the planet had a cooler-than-average month; ever since then it’s been hot.”

“Americans have produced about a quarter of all the excess carbon in the atmosphere: the 4 percent of us who occupy this land account for 25 percent of the damage, and of course the higher up the ladder you go, the more you produce.”

“I think the worst thing [older Americans have] done is destroy a sense of social solidarity, a sense of commitment to fellow citizens. That ethos is gone and it’s been replaced by a cult of individualism.” – Bruce Gibney

“([Fox news’s] median viewer is sixty-eight years old, which means half of them are above that).”

#billmckibben #environment #bookrecommendations #booksthatmatter #lovethisbook #books #bookreviews #theflagthecrossthestationwagon #humankind #americathebeautiful

IG Link.