Joe Biden told the country today that he was proud to be from Delaware. He wasn't an Ivy League guy and he reminded us about hat when the drumline from his alma mater, the University of Delaware, accompanied the President and the First Lady Jill Biden to their new home: the White House.
There are men and women like Joe and Jill all over the country, tied by bonds of love and family and friends to their hometowns. They stick, if they can, through good times and bad. We know that it's gotten harder to do that in manufacturing towns and if we didn't before, after Jan. 6, we understand the cost.
Most of us here in the United States benefited from the good times. Some benefited more, some less. A lot of us wished we could leave, these last four years. But we stuck through the bad times.
Local musicians express a sense of place. Grounded in specifics, music can transcend to something larger. The Determined Luddites are that band in Tucson, Arizona. They tell the stories of a singular point on the map where globalization and nationalism collide on a daily basis. It's the story of America, even if many of us are just starting to recognize that.
Band member Dan Hostetler wrote this when he posted this video on Jan. 20, 2021:
"I didn't know it at the time, but I pretty much wrote this song about today."
The Determined Luddites, Tucson