As the United States ‘celebrates’ its 250th birthday in the throes of upheavel on both the domestic and world stage, I have been thinking a lot about the America of my youth and the many ways in which our civic culture and quality of life have been degraded over the past half century. I have been thinking especially of my first introduction to the nation via a fateful cross-country drive that I made with friends from Los Angeles to New York City in 1976, when I was only 16 years old, in order to participate in the bicentennial festivities of that year in the Big Apple. My latest blog revisits that journey with an eye to what I experienced along my way and what it means in the context of current American and global issues. My missive takes special account of the role of artists and creatives in shaping a better path forward, arguing that both then an now so much of our success and vitality as a working democracy is finally rooted in the vision and audacity of our creative class and youth culture.

On November 9, 1989, a wall that had divided the peoples of the East and the West in continental Europe (and around the world) since the early years following WWII came tumbling down. For nearly five decades, the Berlin Wall had stood as a symbol of state-imposed repression. On its western side, artists, students, activists,

Recent major changes in my life and in the world have inspired something of a renaissance in my creative undertakings. For much of the past five years, as I pursued action scholarship at The New School University’s Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy, my responsibilities as a public intellectual prevented me from finding the