Summer has finally arrived, with a vengeance. Just when many were about to give up wondering if the calendar would ever align with the thermometer, July’s iconic heat has come a-calling once again as surely as Smokey’s Greater Shows always pays Bath a visit during Heritage Days.

Actually, the long awaited heat wave showed up on the first day of Bath’s special celebration, still officially June and five days before the Fourth’s independent reverie of pride in our shared history.

This year that reverie of feelgood escapism from our actual story as a nation is especially problematic given this place we have arrived at that more and more seems like the worst of times rather than the best of times, though either estimate is often equally way off from historical reality. Today’s events are far, far from the worst America has experienced. We’ve even had worse presidents. How great our greatness ever really was has always depended mostly on a selective perception of ourselves and a once far more easy satisfaction with America’s truly inspiring accomplishments still never having reached anything near what our collective potential might achieve.

America’s good has never been crowned with brotherhood from sea to shining sea. We still have a long ways to go to fulfill that failed patriotic ideal. Not so far as necessary at the outbreak of our Civil War, or at the start of MLK’s March on Washington, but still a great distance from becoming truly magnificent. Heritage Days, if truthfully observed, could become a much needed annual appraisal of where Bath and America’s potentiality actually stands, commemorating the best of our traditions while acknowledging our past failings so as not to repeat them.

This year’s Heritage Days festivities started out with a most promising impromptu addition to its traditional mix of affirmative history and positive community spirit. Trying to provide as much shade as possible on an already very hot Saturday morning, Bath’s Customs House stood as backdrop to a politically heated but well mannered civic uprising protesting America’s most current failure of its touted exceptionalism by demonstrating a still proud faith in America’s fundamental democratic values.

Gathering together in solidarity with thousands of others holding similar protests nationwide, local residents joined in voicing condemnation of our current administration’s draconian “zero tolerance” immigration policy. Nothing new was said that hadn’t already been expressed by prior public outcries, and those present seemed likely choir members more than the newly converted, but just by being there as a small satellite contribution to much larger demonstrations elsewhere added another necessary ripple to a growing wave of vocal opposition to regressive intolerance. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, that wave swept across America. Two thousand gathered in Portland. Thirty-five thousand came together in D.C.. Seventy thousand in Los Angeles.

Parked in front of the Customs House was a conspicuously solitary attendee seated in a white patio chair in back of an impressively large white pickup truck sporting two flags. One was our state flag with its familiar North Star Dirigo sentiment. The other displayed a coiled snake and a cautionary “Don’t Tread On Me.” Combined with the particularly opportune parking space, the overall effect conveyed a certain deliberateness stating that his being there wasn’t mere happenstance.

After a somewhat reluctant participation in initiating introductions, and a cautiously accepted handshake, his political leanings were confirmed though the purpose of his overt presence remained unstated. What was clearly expressed in our brief exchange of mostly opposing viewpoints was that he was fully participatory in an obviously heartfelt conservative reality concerned with where America’s been, where it is now and where it’s heading. Referencing the sign held by my friend who had accompanied me in this spontaneous outreach towards dialogue, he agreed that immigrant families should be kept together, “Only not here.”

His principal concern was that he believed welcoming unchecked immigration would lead to America becoming a Third World nation where the sovereignty of his sixth generation Mainer heritage would no longer mean anything.

I asked him what he thought of discouraging undocumented immigration by establishing a policy of imprisoning employers whose hiring practices break immigration law and seizing their assets to pay for such interdiction. Without hesitation he had no objection with that, “If they’re repeat offenders.”

Both at the start and end of our encounter he insisted that, “I won’t change your mind and you won’t change mine.” Maybe. But, for a moment here and there in our chance exchange of mostly expected disagreement, the commonality of our interest in a grassroots participatory involvement in what America should stand for assumed something approximating mutual respect and certainly adhered to more civility than exampled by most elected officials.

Conservatives aren’t wrong on everything, only on everything liberals want to change. Liberals are always wrong by right of all that conservatives hold near and dear, by wanting to disrupt a perfectly fine status quo that’s worked very well in favoring those already advantaged, those whom it has historically endowed with a privileged heritage.

We’re all part of one family. Too bad it’s so dysfunctional.

Gary Anderson lives in Bath.