FROM THE PUBLISHER | On our 'small town'

Are we from a small town, here in Manhattan? Depends on your definition. My New York and LA friends would certainly see it that way, but this is also the home of a major university, next door to a giant Army base. So maybe we don’t quite qualify. It’s not like everybody in town goes over to Chester’s to raise a barn after a storm; it’s not like everybody farms wheat.

My small town, though, is the small town that welcomes everybody. My small town doesn’t threaten or bully; in fact, my problem with the vibe of Mr. Aldean’s song is that, if you want to try to pull that threatening thing in my small town, good luck with that. Word gets around, and people might not smile so much when they see you coming in the cereal aisle at Dillons.

In that sense, Mr. Aldean has a valid point. Where he whiffs, I think, is where the song comes off as threatening to those who disagree, who protest, who take positions outside the norm. It’s the bully who will have the problem, at least in my small town. Small towns tend to exert a moderating influence, because you know people in lots of different contexts.

I prefer to think of my small town in the vibe of “Long Walk Home,” the Springsteen tune from his album contemplating American values in the context of the second Iraq war.

My father said “Son, we’re lucky in this town,

It’s a beautiful place to be born.

It just wraps its arms around you,

Nobody crowds you, nobody goes it alone.”

He goes on to say: “Your flag flyin’ over the courthouse/Means certain things are set in stone./ Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t.”

America, I might add at the risk of repeating myself, is an idea. It’s not a tribe or a religion or a place. It’s an idea, and that idea is about freedom. That idea is inclusive, not exclusive. There are laws and restrictions, of course, but the general concept is that you’re free to do whatever you want, so long as you don’t violate my rights. Your rights end where mine begin. As John Mellencamp put it in his “Small Town”: “I can be myself here in this small town/And people let me be just what I want to be.”

So, carry guns or don’t. Protest or don’t. Riot? No. Confiscation? No. But everybody can agree on that. No need to threaten and warn and thump chests. We don’t do that stuff. Doesn’t go over well in a small town.