Summer is the season in which I feel most American. It’s not really the Fourth of July. It’s the woods. I go there, immersed in a previous and romantic time. I’m not the only one. Some go to Canada or the Rockies, some to northern Michigan, Minnesota or Wisconsin, many to northern New England. We encounter cabins, canoes, birch bark—the evocative equipment of the European settlement of this country. We build the campfires for fun that our forebears built from necessity.

Recently I went to the Pennsylvania woods for a wedding. The guests stayed in cabins and a rustic lodge on the banks of a river. Cousins and friends from all over the U. S. reconnected. One quarter of the guests were children, who realized they were safe and mostly related, so they ran unsupervised until dusk. Since the children were happy, the parents were happy. The bride was smart and gorgeous; the groom handsome and successful. They both had suffered sadness before they fell in love, so the ceremony, taking place under a chandelier made of deer antlers, rang with emotion for the guests.

It was a wonderful American wedding of the best sort.

Until we stepped out into another America.

Inexplicably, the rental canoes had Confederate flags painted on them. Were they safe? Were we safe? Then we saw a sign: “Happy Birthday, America. By Invitation Only.” Oh, dear me.

Finally, we read in the newspaper that a 64-year-old Pennsylvania man was traveling to Ohio with a Utah gun permit, recognized in 32 states, that allowed him to pack a semiautomatic .45 pistol hidden from view. He carried it to protect himself, according to the news story.

Uh-oh. This was territory more foreign than most countries we’d ever visited. What fantasy or fear makes a 64-year-old think he needs to carry a semiautomatic weapon? Why do the canoe owners think a symbol of oppression, like the Confederate flag, is appropriate? Which descendant of immigrants believes that now others shouldn’t be welcomed?

The wedding guests were wary. They hadn’t encountered many people who were hostile to immigrants, or embraced a weapon-bearing pathology or recalled fondly a society in which slavery was okay. But these points of view are apparently acceptable to some groups. And those who think these opinions exist only in the middle of the country should check out a few of their neighbors here in Massachusetts.

Because it goes further than Pennsylvania. Over the last decade, the license to be mean, predatory, bigoted and greedy has been greater than at any time I can remember.  It has produced people and entities you don’t want to know: certain bankers, Wall Street, gay-haters, Madoff, the “birthers,” certain priests and their enablers, Anthem, the profitable California health insurance company that raised its rates 40 percent. (Anthem did ultimately back down.) The list is longer, but you get the idea.

It started in 1994 with Newt Gingrich’s “Contract on America.” At the same time he was visiting his wife in her hospital bed, telling her he was divorcing her while she recovered from breast cancer, he also was ramping up the vitriol toward Americans who didn’t agree with him and putting forth the message that anything goes no matter who is hurt.

I don’t know if the attitudes we saw demonstrated in Pennsylvania are more prevalent than ever before in the history of America, but they are more visible than I’ve ever seen. It’s become okay to be a jerk.

Being a responsible American is a tough row to hoe. We come from cultures as different as any in the world. We don’t agree on religion or science. We have fewer values in common than we pretend to. We have extremists who demand that individuals be able to do anything they damn well please. There is still a huge divide between north and south. Some of us pack concealed weapons while others wonder why the gun-toters are so afraid. Supporting it all is our constitutional right for opinions to be offensive, bigoted, and just plain mean.

Wouldn’t it be nice if summer meant we could go into the woods, cook over a campfire, sing silly songs and admire the birches and not have to encounter troubling people whose natures tend to violence and oppression? But that is not reality. Perhaps it is only the real American Dream.