“Nations are like people,” the US American novelist, short fiction writer and poet Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) remarked in 1926. “It takes a long, long time for one of them to grow up.” That year—that month—the United States was commemorating its one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary, which prompted Anderson to add:
As a nation we are still young. It has only been a hundred and fifty years. What’s that? Well, we may still be wearing short pants, but we are walking down past the clothing stores on Main Street and looking at the spring styles in long pants almost every day now. Such a job we tackled—whew!
Never mind “whew!” How about “whoa”? A “still young” nation? I have heard that one before—back in 2018, at the wedding here in Wales of an international trans student from the United States whose sister told me, probably in response to a reference of mine to the still fresh wound inflicted on democracy by the MAGA king’s first term, that her homeland was bound to make mistakes, and presumably be excused for making them, because the Republic was still so very new.