The Land Of The Frontier

The United States of America can be described in one word. That word is "frontier".

First of all, there is the name itself. I live in an area that has been nowhere near the western frontier for centuries. Yet, not far away there is an avenue called Frontier. There is a phone company, bowling lanes, a school and, a fire department, all named Frontier. In the phone book of our mid-sized city, there is at least a dozen businesses named Frontier.

The days of the western frontier have made a great imprint on American culture, everything from cowboy hats to western movies. Many went west in those days with the hope of "striking it rich" by finding gold. The gold mines are gone now, but Las Vegas has taken their place. Moving out west, or at least spending some time there, is still an American rite of passage.

America is all about the frontier. It is the frontier that gives the country it's sense of purpose. When one frontier closes, America looks for another one to take it's place.

The worst times for America come when it doesn't have a frontier. Before the western frontier was declared closed in 1890, a man who was out of a job could simply head west and start over. There was land for the taking and plenty of work.

The country didn't really adapt well to the closing of the frontier. This would have been an ideal time to join other western countries in implementing a program of social benefits, to be sure that everyone had enough money to live on. The result was the 1929 economic crash. It happened because workers were not being paid enough to be able to buy the products that the factories that they were working for were producing. Factories began cutting back on production, meaning that workers had even less money to buy manufactured products, and it spiralled into a devastating crash.

The same pattern can be seen in warfare. America has always been more comfortable with conventional wars centered around a front line, such as the world wars, as opposed to unconventional wars without a front line, most notably the Vietnam War. The reason is that the front line in a war is actually a frontier, and America is all about frontiers.

America was the world leader in the early development of aircraft. Why? Because the sky was a new frontier, and America is made for frontiers. We were just going upward instead of westward. The same can be said about America's pioneering of skyscrapers.

For the past century, or so, one branch of science that has really revolved around America is astronomy. Much of the modern view of the universe was developed at the Mount Wilson and Palomar astronomical observatories in California, and later at the Keck Telescopes in Hawaii. Should this surprise us, considering that space is a frontier? The latest step has been the Hubble Space telescope.

When people developed the ability to actually send spacecraft and to travel in space, Russia was a very capable space power that put the first satellite and the first human in space. But space is a frontier, and frontiers are America's game. At the time of this writing only Americans have ever been to the moon, not counting unmanned spacecraft.

Is it really a surprise that the internet was developed in America, before spreading to the rest of the world? Remember that cyberspace is a frontier, and frontiers are what America is all about.