Status Updates From A Reverence for Wood

This is fine so far, but not what I expected.

When the nation was struggling to be born, were perhaps our most poignant […] an era where each man was forced to live with piercing intensity and perception. Two centuries later, when an American turns on the water and the lights in his apartment, he has little awareness of where these things come from; the greatest pity, however, is that he says, “Who cares where it comes from, as long as it keeps coming?”