Springsteen's Vision, A Beacon in Dark Times
- Joy Bully
- 7 days ago
- 3 min read
by Neal Zagarella
When Bruce Springsteen says, “The America I have sung to you about for fifty years is real,” I know that to be true. And when he calls the current administration “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous,” I know that to be true as well. Springsteen’s aspirational vision of the country that he loves, encompassing both its troubles and its enduring greatness, is rooted in a deep belief in the dignity of the individual and the opportunities afforded him or her in America’s founding documents. He sees the country, at its best, as vast enough for all of us to find in it our own American dream, and to do it without diminishing the aspirations and goals of others.
The stories Springsteen has told over more than a half century of writing and performing, are of dreamers and searchers, those not content, as Thoreau said, to lead lives of quiet desperation. He reveres his nation as a place that affords many of us the opportunity to chase a deeper meaning in our lives, and despairs when it is denied to others. There is something greater, Springsteen argues, and something deep inside that compels us to find it. More than that, he believes that America, beacon of liberty, was created in that pursuit. That is why the peoples of the world came here, why they keep coming here.
I’ve felt a version of that vision, the quest Springsteen articulates so well in his songs, all of my life. As a teenager sitting next to a girl, gazing at a sky of fireworks. Slightly older, setting off across the country with my best buddy, a van, the summer sun and the outstretched highway. Building a family and a life together with my wife.Traveling those same roads again years later, with our two sons. Some form of that vision was in the eyes of my grandfather and grandmother as they sailed here from Italy. It sustained my mother and her five siblings during the Great Depression, buoyed my father on the USS Ahrens off of Okinawa in 1945.
There aren’t many left from my parents’ generation. Those that suffered through economic calamity and saved the world from Hitler. A friend of mine believes that if the greatest generation was still with us, this current administration would not be. I agree. Theirs was an America that at its core, did not venerate excess or deify bullies. It was a country that understood, as Reagan did, the regenerative value of immigration. Springsteen does his job, as Woody Guthrie did, as James Baldwin did, as Mark Twain and John Steinbeck and Maya Angelou did, because it is necessary. The values espoused by the current administration, if they can in any way be called values, threaten the country and the people Springsteen has written so eloquently about. They are foul remnants of the worst periods of our nation, when jingoism, xenophobia and fear found temporary triumph over the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The overarching irony of this dark and dangerous time is that when Trump and his enablers and apologists have finally exited the scene, it will be left to those of us that have lived Springsteen’s vision of the country, to truly make America great again.
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