The Longest Road is a travel book, the account of an epic journey from the southernmost point in the continental U.S., Key West, Florida, to the northernmost you can get to by road, Deadhorse, Alaska, on the gray shores of the Arctic Ocean. But this story is also an exploration of what unites the United States, and what may be disuniting it. Sometimes I feel that there are more things tearing our social fabric than there were in the divisive Sixties. One example: a petition calling for Texas to secede from the Union recently got 100,000 signatures.
Annaliese Apel, wrangler in Montana
On my trip, I spoke to dozens of people from all walks of life – a couple trying to save the homeless and the addicted in Florida, a Lakota shaman who was also a taco entrepreneur, a former “girl gangster” turned Montana wrangler – and recorded their answers to two questions: What holds a nation so vast and diverse together? Is it holding together as well as it once did? What some of them had to say may surprise you.
If you have any comments on these two questions yourself, feel free to offer them below.
I think a common faith has held us together from the beginning. I think that faith is not commonly held today. The ramifications of not holding faith are breaks in the links of democracy.