Smaller, yet different
Townhall.com George Will July 9, 2006
WASHINGTON — On Tuesday, July 11, the United States will become more geographically stable than it has ever been. It will have been 17,126 days since the admission of Hawaii to statehood on Aug. 21, 1959. The longest previous span between expansions of the nation was the 17,125 days between the admission of Arizona on Feb. 14, 1912, and the admission of Alaska on Jan. 3, 1959. Since then the nation has become, in a sense, smaller through the annihilation of distance and, to some extent, of difference.
An important part of the groundwork — literally, it covered a lot of ground — for today’s America was begun 50 years ago this summer. A conservative Republican president, who grew up in a Kansas town where hitching posts for horses lined unpaved streets, launched what was, and remains, the largest public works project in the nation’s history — the Interstate Highway System. Its ribbons of concrete represent a single thread of continuity through the nation’s history.
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