The Climate Change Committee presents a lecture by Bill McKibben on The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened at 2:00 pm in the Performance Hall and streaming. Like so many of us, McKibben grew up believing—knowing—that the United States was the greatest country on earth. As a teenager, he cheerfully led American Revolution tours in Lexington. He sang “Kumbaya” at church. And with the remarkable rise of suburbia, he assumed that all Americans would share in the wealth. But fifty years later, he finds himself in an increasingly doubtful nation strained by bleak racial and economic inequality, on a planet whose future is in peril. He wonders if any of that trinity of his youth—the flag, the cross, the station wagon—could, or should, be reclaimed in the fight for a fairer future.
