There they were, conjured in the "Marlette's View" editorial cartoon, wide-eyed school children, hands over hearts, reciting a parody of the Pledge of Allegiance. It ran thusly: "...one nation, under surveillance, divisible, with metal detectors and security guards for all." Yes, sometimes we do seem perched equidistant between Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange and Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron. It's depressing.

But Levittown once had better school days, days when there was no "Trench Coat Mafia" nor the culture of incivility and cruelty and abusiveness to fuel such a pathology. If it seems odd to couch things in these terms, let us not forget that Levittown was the original "American Dream" and who better than Levittowners to ask what happened to the "American Dream." These kinds of things did not happen in the 1940s and '50s, Levittown's golden years, because people treated other people like human beings, rather than like yesterday's garbage.

Consider that last sentence. Now contemplate that violence, oppression, and cruelty is the norm in much of the world. How fortunate is Levittown to be so "white picket fence." It is not the Levittown envisioned by pundits who believed in 1947 that Mr. Levitt's massive development would become a vast slum and a festering sore of social decay.

Why did Levittown succeed? As an historian, I am naturally inclined to point to complex economic and social forces and related statistical data. But having been a Levittown resident from 1968 to 1992 (I now reside in Hicksville), I believe it is because Levittowners themselves are fundamentally good people who exude a profound human decency. Just talk to any of the old time residents and listen carefully to their fond recollections. Many endured the hardships of the Great Depression and World War Two. No generation has experienced more history than this one. They were infants when Lindbergh had crossed the Atlantic and they surf the Internet today. They are in their seventies, for the most part, and yet their tale is far from over. What most impresses me, a 37-year-old, about them, however, is not the monumental events, but their everyday experiences. How they and their neighbors got along and raised children in the clean, safe, tranquil, and carefree early days of Levittown may have more to teach generations unborn than the battlefield epics from old veterans' war stories.

Having just written that last sentence, it occurred to me that many of our old World War Two vets might be taken amiss. One cannot even begin to appreciate what they went through between Pearl Harbor and V-J Day. It would be criminal if we were to let future generations forget this. But there will come a time, decades from now, when there will be nobody alive who remembers the Second World War, first hand. It will belong to the ages; become property of history rather than of the memory of the living. It is to those living in that future that the everyday recollections of Levittown become important because although times change and historical epics come and go, in the long run human beings and their strengths and failures remain unchanged. A success story in the chronicle of human society allows people, even in dire circumstances, to know that things can be better, that human beings can live in decent surroundings with other human beings. Levittowners are living proof and have been since 1947.