A sobering fact about America is starkly obvious in the lonely stretch of desert that lies between the Southern California Coast and the business centers of the Midwest. Much of the population of this country is poor and struggling. The poorest rural folks live in inadequate housing strewn along interstate highways. Folks living on the edge of poverty in a scrubby environment are hard to hide. Beat-up, weathered trailer houses scatter and sometimes cluster near intersections where country roads cross the interstate highway. Yard decorations here are mostly abandoned automobiles. To the west of the desert the sprawling urban centers that lie like a wonderful bracelet along the California coast from mexico to the Redwoods create a solid impression of affluence; of course, the poor are there, too. Alluring beaches and holiday attractions easily mask the poverty of people struggling to make ends meet, and cities like Dallas and Fort Worth and Kansas City can tuck their tired vagrants out of the way behind run-down stock yards or in those parts of urban centers that were once thriving but are now economically sick.

Traveling east from Lamy, New Mexico, the landscape changes. Climbing up toward the Continental Divide and Las Vegas, New Mexico, through pine-covered mountains, the America that Georgia O’Keffe and Ansel Adams painted and photographed, a traveler begins to see a very different country, a greener and fresher America. It’s the eye of the beholder that changes everything.

Last week a storm passed through this part of the Southwest leaving puddles in gullies and dusting the tops of the highest mountains with fresh snow. The gold and red of aspen and other deciduous trees interrupt the spread of evergreens across the area north and east of Santa Fe. Oh, beautiful, for spacious skies... From New Mexico the train passes through a bit of Colorado before heading out through the cornfields of Kansas.

I’ve been wondering what would happen if all members of the House of Representatives and Senate were turned loose for a month or two out here where America lives... not dropped off in the familiar districts and states they represent but where whatever they see and hear and say has nothing to do with their being reelected. This year perhaps more than ever before, voters in America are left trying to figure out what it is the people for whom they vote want to accomplish. Are they saying and doing what they say and do mainly to get reelected, or do they put their chances of getting reelected at risk by making the hard choices and doing what they know needs to be done. I personally continue to believe Government is good, that it is a necessary human invention that makes it possible for people to live together with their neighbors and with strangers without doing harm to them. Appropriate, uncorrupted government for the people by the people isn’t likely to happen if we continue to limit criteria for nominating suitable candidates to certifiable born-again Christians who also happen to be good looking and have or can get enough money to mount an absurdly expensive campaign.