While away, I’ve kept up our conversation through the Crier’s republishing a few of the eight hundred letters I’ve written to you From Fly Creek. The ones republished have been among my favorites, and I’ll finish up my in absentia coverage with one more, published back in November of 2000. It speaks to the place of us Americans in the world_a world as yet unshaken and forever changed by the horrors of the following year’s September.

But perhaps that fact makes the column worth re-reading now. As I do so myself, it becomes a touchstone for weighing just how much has altered since the millennium year. Maybe it will do so for you, too. Here it is:

Not long ago, one could return after a rough trip by boat or plane and sigh in relief, "It’s good to be back on terra firma again." These days, earth scientists have taken away that comfort. They remind us that the earth’s firmness is an illusion.

Our planet’s surface, they say, is a mosaic of gigantic plates: islands that, floating on the earth’s molten core, collide and grind against one another, raising mountain ranges on land and on the sea bottom, and offering unwelcome reminders of their mobility through tremors and sometimes devastating quakes.

And the continents themselves, that seem so sharply defined and permanent? They’re fragments, we’re told, of the late, great Pangea, the original land mass that rose alone above otherwise unbroken ancients seas. Some three hundred million years ago, Pangea was pulled apart by the restless shifting of the tectonic plates. (Look for evidence, we’re told, in the picture-puzzle fit if we could nudge North, Central, and South America up against Africa again.)

Having begun to move, the continents have continued their slow drift around the surface of the globe, though across spans of time that mock the brief lives of individual humans and our nations and our civilizations. We humans scurry around on the continents’ surfaces, frantic as ants on floating leaves. And still the continents drift slowly on beneath our feet, perhaps towards inevitable merger and Pangea once again.

It’s a blessing, I guess, that we aren’t steadily aware of their motion. It would haunt us.

These days, though, we Americans are haunted by another kind of continental drift. In today’s human affairs, continents, or at least nations, do seem to be sliding closer together. And that’s doing damage to our national illusion of safety and Olympian superiority.

Electronic communication now has us in constant contact with all the world; and the news of anywhere _ everywhere _ is ours in an instant.

Sophisticated weaponry has made armed borders and even vast oceans inadequate to the defense of any country, including our own. And we wonder if the promise of Star Wars protection (now fifteen years old) is comfort as illusory as whistling oneself past a graveyard.

Even our economic dominance, which had us defining the rest of the world as no more than a market for our goods, has been jolted badly by developing competition that is international, multinational, even supra-national. We’re shocked and shaken to find ourselves competing with, and sometimes losing to, the likes of Japan and, who could have believed it? _ Korea.

The world’s economic power base, once centered around the Mediterranean, had shifted to the Atlantic and to us; and we could not conceive its moving again. But to our chagrin, it is on the move, drifting towards the Pacific rim. And we find ourselves competing as market-place equals with countries with not much land but with towering, self-sacrificing resolve.

And with a work ethic that, by comparison, makes our iron-spined New England forebears look like couch potatoes.

No wonder the tendency to slam up trade barriers, to rattle sabers, to trumpet a return to the good old days when all the world knew who we were: the unquestioned, unchallengeable leader of the world in every way.

In fact, that claim never was unquestioned, never was unchallenged. But, God knows, it used to be easier for us to believe. Now every day’s newspaper reminds us: we’re not the only game in town.

The answer to this is not, of course, to throw up our hands or, still worse, deny the wonder that this nation truly is. For if we’re not the new Chosen People (as we have so often told ourselves we are), we are undeniably a nation God-blessed: in our land, our resources, our precious form of government. And in our national temperament which, at its best, is open, energetic, positive, and as generous as any in the world’s history.

The answer, truly, is to accept what we are, to rejoice in it; and, in every sphere of activity, to find our place in the world’s changing order.

For change it will, just as surely as the continents beneath will continue their drift, indifferent to what we build or destroy on their backs.

Jim Atwell lives in and views life from Fly Creek. Learn about his book at JimAtwell.com.