Source: RealClearPolitics
by J Peder Zane
“As our great nation celebrates its 250th anniversary in a time of angry division, when we are wondering who we are as a people and what we stand for, the Grateful Dead’s legacy offers useful ways to think about such questions. Like the best ideas, they didn’t insist on answers but pushed us to consider possibilities. The band was quintessentially American because it gave equal play to the great forces of our society – rugged individualism and community – resolving the tension between ideas that our politics too often cast as conflicting. Or, as the group’s first-among-equals, Jerry Garcia, would have put it, every yin depends on a yang.” (01/23/26)