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The Old NeighborhoodMy Alaska, and Sarah Palin's, deserves better from America.

By Jim AlbrechtPosted Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008, at 6:43 PM ET

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I know the Internet was supposed to help us get beyond our divisions—regional, linguistic, ideological, utensilary—and share in a kind of technologically enabled solidarity. But it has done the opposite. Witness the blogosphere feeding frenzy over the "true" maternity of Sarah Palin's child. (BTW, you think the name Trig is weird? I had a teacher who named her daughter 9. Not Nine, mind you, but 9.) Witness the conviction with which some people still discuss Obama's allegiance to Islam.

I imagine Sarah Palin grew up in a neighborhood much like my own: It was a neighborhood where, although Tommy used to refer to his partner as his "husband," there was never a debate about gay marriage; a neighborhood where, although my mother was a founder of Alaska Right-to-Life and the Air Force officer's wife was staunchly pro-choice, their friendship (and her occasional role as my babysitter) never faltered. We identified not by our ideologies but by our geography. On my block, you never imagined that any of these freaks—gay, straight, military, religious, redneck, kibbutzim—didn't love America. After all, we loved one another.

This sense of responsibility for the welfare of one's neighbors—even those whose lifestyles or beliefs give you the creeps—is still alive in glimmers. Palin's enduring popularity across party lines in Alaska would not be possible without it. She has governed pragmatically and without ideological rancor. In 2006, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that the state was obliged to extend employee benefits to same-sex partners of its employees. The legislature subsequently passed a bill that would block the state from extending these benefits. Palin vetoed the measure, even though she, too, opposed the court decision. "Signing this bill," she explained, "would be in direct violation of my oath of office." In other words, she saw her ideological views as subordinate to her obligation to the rule of law. And unlike the legislature, she apparently saw no sense in creating further division when the only practical result would be more litigation and a heightened sense of division and offense.

But, eventually, politics poisons everything. And now there is the home girl, nearly my own age, in front of the network cameras, styled as the attack dog and set up to read churlish lines about her fellow citizens—who, for their part, will villainize her and her family and her religion and her region.

I never thought it possible for Alaska to be the anvil of such partisan animosity—for Alaska, the land of libertarian neighborliness, to be sent to the front in the culture wars. I suppose the circumstances of one's childhood always tend to melt away slowly into new construction and nostalgia and loss, so I don't claim to be unique. But the harshness of the light on Sarah Palin calls up those distant memories, and their dissipation seems now abrupt, as if the old neighborhood was subject to aerial bombardment and civil war.

In the old days, people used to leave their cabins unlocked in the winter (with notes saying, "Take what you need, leave what you can") because it was considered reckless to lock a shelter against those who might come across it in desperate straits. Growing up, we had no Internet to bring us together, but we had a shared geography that did so in a much more powerful way. Wilderness has a bully pulpit all its own, and, back when we could still hear it over the cell phones and the four-stroke snow machines, it preached a repetitive sermon. 1) We don't all have to agree about everything, 2) but we do all have to survive the winter. If the Alaska of my childhood could be put on the stump, I believe that would be the content of its speech.

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Jim Albrecht is a writer who lives in Philadelphia and Chickaloon, Alaska. Over the past 12 months, his diet has included moose, bear, caribou, salmon, quiche, and arugula.

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