Hands Across America Archives - Citizen of the Month

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Participants of Hands Across America in 1986

After 20 shameful years of failure, “Hands Across America” has finally been completed, as bloggers across the country hold “virtual” hands from one coast to the other, creating a “chain of blogger love,” and unifying the United States.Â Â America is back on the right track!

All participants — please touch your monitors tonightÂ at 10PM EST.Â You will be holding the virtual hands of other fineÂ American bloggers.Â If you were not on the designated cross-country route, please feel free to join in the festivities anyway — or just serve us all some ice cold lemonade.

WE BEAT LANCE BASS IS GAY!

A Year Ago on Citizen of the Month:Â The Biggest Tip She Ever Got

Pat Benatar at “Hands Across America”

Since the last election, our country seems to be split, our citizens at odds with one another. Blue States vs. Red States. Blacks vs. Whites. Liberals vs. Conservatives.

Have we forgotten that we are one country: The United States of America, from sea to shining sea? Was it only twenty years ago that we all stood hand-in-hand, brother and brother, across this great land for a honorable cause?

“On the afternoon of Sunday, May 25, 1986, more than five million people joined hands to form a line that stretched 4,152 miles â€“ from New York City’s Battery Park to a pier in Long Beach, California. This nationwide event, called Hands Across America, was intended to raise money to fight hunger and homelessness.”

Brooke Shields stood as anchor at the George Washington Bridge in New York. Ronald Reagan held hands at the White House. Bill Clinton was in Arkansas. Millions were raised. An awful song was written. For fifteen minutes, we were all one people.

But there is a dirty little secret about this event, something that has been festering for twenty years:

The “unbroken chain” never really worked.

“There were many breaks in the chain. In order to allow the maximum number of people to participate, the path linked major cities and meandered back and forth within the cities.”

In some places, like in the Arizona desert, there were long stretches of emptiness.

For many of us, this failure has haunted us for two decades. Some say this was a new generation’s Vietnam — a societal disappointment that has prevented many of us from becoming self-actualized individuals.

But can we fix the mistakes of the past? Can our country become whole again? Can WE become whole again?

I say YES. In the last twenty years, modern technology has brought us high speed internet and blogging. We can finish the job left undone.

The following is the original route used in Hands Across America for connecting the two coasts:

To reproduce and finally complete this historic event twenty years later, we will need AT LEAST one blogger in the following states to be a part of an unbroken blogger chain across America: