I’m on the highway a lot. I end up eating in whatever fast food joint or diner happens to be… I’m on the highway a lot. I end up eating in whatever fast food joint or diner happens to be closest when I most need a break. I sit alone. Eat, drink and listen. People tend to be the same. Their clothes vary more than their expressions, and their expressions more than their conversations.

I like to think that we are a nation of people lulled to silence by the maternal hum of progress. I like to believe that we as a nation do indeed have a voice, and that when it’s most needed, the world will hear it.

I sit in diners and burger shops and am forced to consider the possibility that there may be nothing more defining our national identity than geography and consumerism. What used to seem like quiet desperation now appears to be resigned discontent. I keep expecting the passion and intelligence that does exist within every one of us to ignite nationwide in reaction to some event or other.

We’ve all seen massive displays of passion. I’ve heard intelligent commentary ripe with promising ideas. I’ve never witnessed them together. Alone, neither is particularly valuable. The passionate act without thought, while the thoughtful live too afraid of passion to act with enough conviction to sway the media-manufactured masses.

The world’s complicated. These problems and impasses and all this inaction – it’s understandable. We’re trying hard. We’re making progress, and everyone’s well-intentioned. There are a few exceptions, but they’re just products of anachronistic environments soon to be eradicated, and even those environments came about only because of misunderstandings and misfortune.

Ultimately, we want the same things. We differ in how we think we should go about getting them, but we are one people with one view united under God with a manifest destiny to spread democracy and firewater to the unwashed peoples of the world.

That’s the America we’re allowing ourselves to become. Now is not the time for compromise. This game of drawing one line in the sand and rubbing it out to keep the bully from crossing a different line – this game needs to end. Real lines have been drawn in blood. Simply because it’s been kept from our daily lives by pretty magnetic ribbons doesn’t make it any less real.

However heartfelt, trite ejaculations of patriotic sentiment must not go unchallenged. It’ll be awkward. It’ll be uncomfortable. But we all need to risk engaging strangers, co-workers, even family, in conversations that will probably end in some level of conflict.

More is required than just a willingness to make a point in public. We’ve got to have opinions. We need informed, carefully considered opinions that can be expressed in about as much time as a beer commercial. I can’t do that, not well. It’s hard, but it’s becoming increasingly urgent.

We need to prepare ourselves so that the next time a catalyst is stirred into American life, we surge in a meaningful direction. Otherwise it will just intoxicate the powerful, who will do little more than drunk-dial nuclear nations and urinate through the windows of underdeveloped neighbors.

I don’t know how much longer we can go on speeding down the highway before our lives really are defined by the time we’ve spent buying what was easily available or pausing to repeat the same stories, to complain about the weather or to smack children who know enough to resent being shoved in the backseat.

Pick a fight with Zak Sharif by e-mailing him at [email protected].