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Bill McKibben and I have a lot in common. We both grew up in Massachusetts鈥擨 in the 1950s in Wellesley, he in the 1970s in Lexington. He鈥檚 now graying; my hair is long since white. Both of us were deeply affected by the 1960s, he as a child witnessing the Vietnam protesters, I as one of them. Each of us has been committed to the struggle against climate change for decades. 

McKibben鈥檚 new book, a personal memoir hitched to national history, is . Like McKibben, I too wonder what the hell happened鈥攚hy, when we grew up with such worthy American dreams, are we now plagued with such haunting nightmares? It鈥檚 a question that badgers a lot of us of a certain age. The flag, the cross, and the station wagon of his title are symbols of the values of patriotism, religion, and community鈥攂ut also of the forces that pulled White middle-class Americans away from our worthy dreams, even as we pursued them. 

As a teenager, McKibben was a summer tour guide on the Lexington battlefield. The book鈥檚 first section, 鈥淭he Flag,鈥� reveals the tension between comforting, myth-based patriotism and the real history we don鈥檛 want to hear. I was visiting Concord when I read McKibben鈥檚 description of Paul Revere riding for freedom, past a spot well-known in 1775 as the place where an enslaved man and his sister, Mark and Phillis Codman, had been brutally executed. Yet, rigorously as he spotlights Lexington鈥檚 history of racism, McKibben acknowledges that along with our founding mythology, he also absorbed the aspiration to a more perfect freedom. 

In 鈥淭he Cross,鈥� McKibben describes how profoundly he was shaped by his early experience in Lexington鈥檚 Congregational church. In Wellesley, my mother, her mother, and her grandmother had been pillars of the Unitarian church. But like Lexington, Wellesley was a White and wealthy town. Most of my friends went to either our church or the Congregational church across the square. Growing up, I had only one Catholic friend and never met a Jew or person of color, much less a Muslim. Like McKibben, I value the love, justice, and inclusion at the core of Christianity. Yet the challenge for all religious communities is how to hold an inspiring faith and a sense of belonging without tribalism, racism, and exclusionary personalization.

What McKibben calls a 鈥渟tation wagon鈥� in the third section of his memoir, I first knew as a 鈥渂each wagon.鈥� It was a Ford 鈥淲oody,鈥� and in the summer we would pile into it and head for the shore. Check out the old ads for those big cars that could carry half a football team, with happy White faces celebrating family and social togetherness. But the growth of highways and car ownership enabled the post-war explosion of White suburbia, which in turn opened a yawning gap between rich and poor. McKibben shows how our very prosperity, enabled by the development of suburbs, shattered the village commons that had centered our New England villages around the common good.

So, what underlying national flaw drew us so sadly off course? McKibben has been working on this question for a long time. Back in 1992, he devoured a brain-busting 1,700 hours of cable TV, concluding that the media鈥檚 overwhelming message to the viewer was 鈥淵ou are the most important thing on Earth.鈥� Underscoring this now, he writes, this obsession with ourselves 鈥渢urns out to be the key to our political evolution (and to the fact that the Arctic ice cap is mostly melted).鈥� 

鈥淔or me,鈥� he goes on, 鈥渢he scariest thing about the last forty years, even more than the rising temperature, was the ascension of the libertarian idea that the individual matters far more than the society an individual inhabits.鈥� 

I was born in 1940, a year before the U.S. entered World War II. I remember standing outside as a child, looking up at the evening sky and wondering if that ominous rumble I heard was an enemy plane, as my parents pulled down the blackout shades. No one then thought those mandated shades threatened their individual freedom.

Americans came together, won the war, and (we thought) saved the world. My uncle brought back tales of Navy life on a Pacific carrier, but he also told us about our great-great-grandfather from Concord who was wounded in the Civil War. The stories I grew up with, whether about fighting Confederates or Nazis, told of a victorious American struggle against oppression. But by the early 1960s, war stories had lost their glow, and our country was torn apart over Vietnam. I joined the Peace Corps.

McKibben鈥檚 generation and mine were mentored by a new cast of heroes: Kennedy, King, Coffin, and also Friedan, Dylan, and Baez. They urged us to break with an ethos steeped in injustice. Paradoxically invoking 鈥渄o-your-own-thing鈥� individualism, we became the counterculture. As the 鈥�60s flamed out, like many going 鈥渂ack to the land,鈥� I moved to Vermont. McKibben is living here now, too. The longing for balance between individual agency and communal responsibility led me to co-create alternative institutions, like a new kind of community college in Vermont, and years later, the Whidbey Institute near Seattle鈥攚here McKibben, prolific writer, founder of , and his generation鈥檚 leading advocate for climate action, once taught.

Yet the pursuit of the common good is still stymied by what McKibben calls 鈥渉yper-individualism.鈥� I sharply recall seeing Ronald Reagan snap, 鈥淚 am paying for this microphone!鈥� at the 1980 Republican debate. It spoke volumes about who gets to be heard in our capitalistic society. As we uncover the founding injustices of our nation鈥攐f land theft from Native Americans, of slavery鈥檚 ugly scrawl on the very Constitution鈥攊t鈥檚 clear how the shrill claim of 鈥淚t鈥檚 mine!鈥� has drowned out the claims of justice.

In the 1990s, I joined three colleagues to study how people form a commitment to the common good. When asked why they lived such commitments, those who did would often reply, 鈥淏ecause I can鈥檛 not.鈥� That double negative reflected their deep sense of connection, of embeddedness in a larger whole. We cannot not try to make a difference. For those of us who live such commitment, real freedom is found in understanding our radical interdependence鈥攖he individual is fulfilled within community, not without it.

McKibben sometimes describes himself, with a grin, as 鈥渏ust a Sunday School teacher.鈥� He is also a prophet, and his final chapter is essentially a sermon. He invokes the heartbreaking carbon debt people his age and mine are leaving to our grandchildren and recognizes that our good fortune came at an intolerable cost to future generations. Redemption, he reminds us, 鈥渞ests not on suppressing the truth of our past, but on engaging and overcoming it.鈥� 

We can鈥檛 not act. At the end of his book, McKibben points older Americans to activism, like his Third Act project that organizes people over 60 for progressive change. It offers a chance for redemption, mobilizing elders to reawaken the dreams of their youth through action. It is not too late for those of us in our sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth decades to march in solidarity with our children and grandchildren鈥攖his time not for the American dream, but for the dream of a world that works for all.