b'We are all too eager to move on. We keep pressing forward, doing the same thing over and over again, hoping for a different result, as if covering new terrain will make up for our inability to have settled properly that from which weve come: The American disease is the assumption that when a man has exploited and used up the possibilities of one place, he has only to move on to another place. This has made us a nation of tran-sients, both physically and morally. . .It seems to me that our people are suffering terribly from a sort of spiritual nomadism, a loss of meaningful contact with the earth and the earths cycles of birth, growth and death.We are a dis-placed people. This is a hard thing to say from a perch of privilege, while 70 million refugees are suffering much more immediate and severe forms of displacement around the world. Yet, Americans failure to recognize and reckon with the legacy of displacement that is at the heart of our national experiment casts a long shadow, here and abroad, and unless we are able to dispel it, this shadow will continue to cause suffering on a global scale. Wendell Berrys heightened sense of place is a response to this shadow:My devotion thins as it widens. I care more for my household than for the town of Port Royal, more for the town of Port Royal than for the County of Henry, more for the county of Henry than for the State of Kentucky, more for the State of Kentucky than for the United States of America. But I do not care more for the United States of America than for the world.I must attempt to care as much for the world as for my household. Those are the poles between which a competent morality would balance and mediate: the doorstep and the planet. The most meaningful dependence of my house is not on the U.S. government, but on the world, the earth. No matter how sophisticated and complex and powerful our institutions, 15'