The Super Bowl

On the last day of April, 1803, 221 years ago when Thomas Jefferson had just turned 60, the United States purchased 828,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River for $15 an acre.

From France.

Not theirs to sell or ours to buy, but westward expansion was a king tide that could not be contained.

There were roughly 5.5 million people in the country at the time, almost 900,000 of them slaves, according to the 1800 census, the second ever, and those people, the free ones, wanted someplace to go grow food and children, and live, and someday play a Super Bowl — with each other.

Sixty years later, when Florida had been a state for a mere 15 years, there were about 31.5 million souls in a country of 33 states and 10 territories. By 1900, only 35 years after the Civil War, the tally was 76.3 million.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, especially given the words on the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor where it had been planted in 1885, of those 76.3 million Americans tallied at the turn of the wildly exciting 20th century, 14% had been born outside the United States.

Roger Williams

Stay with me on this spinning top of a trip a moment longer: By 1960, following the climactic end of World War II in 1945, Hawaii and Alaska had recently surrendered territorial status to be granted statehood. That brought America’s tally in states to 50, and in people to 179.3 million, with 95% or 19 out of 20 born here.

By the 2000 census, though, we managed to regain an early 20th century demographic flavor: of the nation’s 281.4 million residents counted only 24 years ago, 31.1 million, or 11.1%, were foreign born. Just like in the good ol’ days.

Florida has rolled along apace. The place included 87,445 residents five years after its 1845 statehood, in the 1850 census, although that count seems a little iffy to me. My bet is about 10,000 more got lost in the swamp somewhere, people who failed to get out and be counted again for some years, if ever.

By 1900 we still only had roughly 530,000, but in 1960, about the time both mosquito control and affordable air conditioning for homes became part of our lives, the population here was already 4.95 million.

As the state became more comfortable, the masses began to arrive — immigrants from the northeast, the Midwest, from Colorado in my case — people at no risk of getting lost in the swamp because it was either crisscrossed with roads and canals or done up with a Sears Roebuck on one end of a mall and a JCPenney on the other (now those anchors have become others, but the pattern remains).

Admittedly some people got lost in the malls of the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, swamps of their own, and never came back, but by 2000 the Florida population was 16.05 million.

And now, friend, we’ll be rolling through the 23 million mark this year in the Sunshine State. The demographers say — citing a statistic that probably doesn’t mean much in any one location or another — that we now average 401 people per square mile.

They don’t offer an estimate of drivers per linear foot on Sunshine State roads, but I figure at rush hour just about anywhere it probably equals somewhere in the vicinity of two drivers for every linear foot of roadway.

Our planning, man. WTH.

For some reason I began to consider what all this means while watching that premier American sports event, a lucrative gridiron investment scheme known as the Super Bowl, with its extraordinary overtime conclusion, on Sunday night.

Kansas City is a great town, the Chiefs are a great football team — and they won in Las Vegas, in the last three seconds of an overtime quarter, after being stymied (an old-time word for out-played) through most of the previous four quarters.

White and Black players and staff with spectators from every corner of our national existence — some of whom would make vast sums of money from the game that could comfortably settle them and their children for decades to come — met with joy in their hearts and (for those some) dollar signs in their eyes under closely supervised conditions with very specific rules.

And they did it together.

What became clear to me is that throughout the game, just as throughout the extraordinarily progressive and sometimes violent history of our remarkable republic, one fact has always remained the same, no matter what time period, what laws or what cultural attitudes existed: Whatever we do, we have to do it together.

In looking at the population figures of the nation, and because I seem to posses a temperament in which joy and sorrow are dizygotic (fraternal) twins, I’m deeply saddened, simply because all those Americans, generation upon generation, have died, the vast majority forgotten.

“The years grow thin,” Charles Bukowski scribbled in one complaintive little poem, and for every man and woman, for every generation, it’s always true.

We’re born into a place and time exclusive to the people of that time. The heroes and villains, the great artists or football players or leaders, and the less great, all will vanish together into time. These are the only people with whom we can share our adventure as humans, our games, and any product we collectively decide to leave for some still faceless generation to come.

So, says Super Bowl 58 — says our greetings to each other, our children en route to school, our community building, our laws aimed at equal treatment for all, just like on the gridiron — let’s put our hearts into the game.

Together. ¦

The post The Super Bowl first appeared on Fort Myers Florida Weekly .