Josh Brodesky: At a battlefield in a battleground state, searching for a renewed America

Growing up in Southern Arizona, as I did, is, in some ways, to grow up at the edge of our nation.

Washington, D.C., New York City, Boston or Pennsylvania — places so central to American identity and cohesion — are more than 2,000 miles from my childhood home on the western edge of Tucson. A place like Gettysburg, Pa., which I visited for the first time in September, even with its weight of history and timeless sorrow, can somehow feel removed.

Such geographic circumstances don’t make one separate from the nation. An Arizonan is as American as a New Yorker — even if a New Yorker’s view of the world looks past us — or a Texan, as I am now.

It’s just that the dominant culture of the Northeast, be it the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade or a white Christmas or the Washington Monument or a Civil War battlefield, can feel distant because, well, it is distant. As a kid, I could identify various types of cholla — chain-fruit, teddy bear, pencil — but not a birch or a sycamore.

While I loved our nation and felt gratitude for being an American in the traditional patriotic sense, even late into high school, I felt little to no connection to policies generated in Washington, D.C., art and culture produced in New York City, or history found in a battlefield like Gettysburg.

These were far-flung places. In other words, they were not really my concern, even if the policies, culture and weight of history emanating from these places shaped my life, sometimes — often — in hidden ways.

That understanding changed with time, thanks to teachers, mentors, working as a journalist and listening to people about their concerns and lives, National Public Radio, books, simply living in other parts of the country as an adult.

I could go on, write an entirely different essay about growing up and the influences that change one’s perspective, but for today, here is the takeaway: I’m now 46, a father to two young Texans, and I have never felt more connected to our nation, imperfect as it may be, divided as we are.

That love has deepened as our national dialogue has coarsened. Sometimes that love overflows with joy, like when Katie Ledecky crushed it at the Paris Olympics. Sometimes it washes over me akin to a tidal wave of sorrow, as it did after the murder of George Floyd, or after dehumanizing rhetoric about Haitian immigrants eating pets, or after the calamitous end to our military presence in Afghanistan.

And sometimes this love for our nation feels like a grasping, a clawing, a yearning for something lost, something taken for granted, like after a thwarted assassination attempt or the storming of the Capitol.

Boundless gratitude

I felt all this earlier this month visiting Gettysburg. Traversing the battlefield, a tourist among many other tourists passing through a bucolic landscape of ridgelines and valleys — and sycamores — a place where Americans killed Americans.

Gettysburg is some 2,217 miles from my childhood home. Growing up, I never imagined standing on a battlefield in the middle of what we now call a battleground state, as though we are at war with each other.

When our guide, Douglas Douds, faculty with the Army War College, told us the story of the Minnesota 1st Regiment, whose vastly outnumbered members charged Confederate lines at the close of the battle’s second day, this time my love for our nation erupted in boundless gratitude.

So many members of this regiment sacrificed themselves to buy the Union Army five minutes to rally reinforcements, and in so doing, they may have shifted a battle, a war and a nation. For a moment, a battleground beneath my feet, time and distance compressed. Their sacrifice was inextricably bound to the contours of my life. Or as the late, great John Prine sang, his grandfather “voted for Eisenhower because Lincoln won the war.”

Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, Nov. 19, 1863, is an exquisite piece of writing, notable for its brevity, punctuated by an inclusive rhetoric that contemporary politics too often tramples and that algorithms on social media are not designed to capture. As Douds noted during our tour, it is a speech filled with the words “we” and “us.” It’s all there in Lincoln’s conclusion:

“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

On Jan. 1, 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. One hundred years later, on Aug. 28, 1963, during the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr., standing at the Lincoln Memorial, spoke of our broken promise of equality and freedom for all, describing it as a check yet to be cashed. Like Lincoln, King invoked inclusive, aspirational rhetoric, an increased devotion to what America could and should be.

“With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood,” King said in his “I Have a Dream” speech. “With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to climb up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.”

Together. Together. Together.

Timeless antidote

It is 161 years from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to 2024, and more than 2,200 miles from my Tucson roots to the battlefield.

It is 61 years from King's “I have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C., and 2,280 miles from Tucson to the Lincoln Memorial.

And yet, there is no distance. Their words remain inspirational and immediate because they give voice to the aspirations of our country, as well as the character, ideals and sacrifices that can shape it.

They are an antidote, then, to the forces of division and antagonism. Right here. Right now. Timeless.

Just as I never imagined, as a child, visiting Gettysburg or feeling so connected to our nation, I also never imagined we would be so bitterly divided or that I would somehow have to explain that division to my own young children. Oftentimes, I simply say that we haven’t always been like this.

That division — a symptom of isolation, really — can feel expansive and overpowering. It is beyond me, and yet, like the rest of our nation, I am caught up in it. I have no solution to the division of our time, only, having stood at Gettysburg, an increased devotion to our better angels.