{"id":5705,"date":"2009-06-02T15:31:24","date_gmt":"2009-06-02T15:31:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5705"},"modified":"2009-06-02T15:31:24","modified_gmt":"2009-06-02T15:31:24","slug":"its-a-great-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5705","title":{"rendered":"it’s a great country"},"content":{"rendered":"

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That’s me, hard at work yesterday morning at Project Vote Smart’s HQ in Montana. By later that day, I was in my old home town of Washington, DC, walking near Dupont Circle on a warm summer evening. By later this evening, I’ll be home in a Massachusetts suburb, in a detached house with a driveway, nestled among tens of thousands like it.<\/p>\n

I’m still impressed by the speed and ease of travel, but what really strikes me is the vast diversity of this country. Yesterday, as we drove in a pickup truck through a small town in Montana that looked like a place where Gary Cooper could still walk bowlegged out of the saloon, my driver noted that New York State is better than you’d think. Upstate, he said, there are lots of regular people–dairy farmers and the like. I happen to be from Upstate, but from a dense city built on auto parts and salt rather than milk. We’ve got all kinds <\/em>of “regular people,” and we’re all part of one vast, complicated, interdependent whole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That’s me, hard at work yesterday morning at Project Vote Smart’s HQ in Montana. By later that day, I was in my old home town of Washington, DC, walking near Dupont Circle on a warm summer evening. By later this evening, I’ll be home in a Massachusetts suburb, in a detached house with a driveway, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5705\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}