I recently viewed the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting. The final shot is a widescreen view of an old car driven through a verdant landscape, as the hero, who happens to be a mathematical genius (Matt Damon), drives into his future, having resolved his issues, seeking new opportunities in California.

It’s a cliché, seen in many films before, but it carries a truth about this most vibrant, ambiguous, deeply puzzling nation that is America. The tears in my eyes I realised were not emotion for the character, Will Hunting, so much, as grief for America, a country that has shaped me significantly. A country which has been a welcoming beacon for millions. I fear that country has gone forever.

As a child I was drawn to America. The comics I read, the music I enjoyed and the pictures I saw on Friday nights in the Ozone theatre, in outback Mildura, captivated me. I wanted to be an usherette when I grew up. I loved the westerns, the musicals, the black noir, the comedies, those determined women, Barbara Stanwyck, Katherine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and Betty Grable (my favourite film star) who transported me to a world where I could be anything I wanted to be.

My American penfriend sent me bubble-gum. It was special. I was infected with the American dream.

I felt like a misfit in Mildura. I could not see myself living the life my mother and Mildura women did, as domestics doing the cooking and the housework, gathering for afternoon teas and worthy community work. I wanted to live like my father. He seemed to be having all the fun, doing things that mattered in the community. My two older sisters disapproved of my desire to work at something — marry, yes — but to have a life of my own. And I wondered if there was something wrong with me.

I grew interested in politics, then developing a love-hate relationship with the US which continued to draw me in, despite my growing understanding of the ambivalent role of the US in global politics, and the goings-on of the imperialist John Foster Dulles who asserted US dominance of the world. I, somehow, separated those politics from the America I believed in.

I met and married Don. But the call of the US remained enticing, and we travelled with our two young children to Stanford University in California; he did a PhD and I, an MA in film studies.

The day I set foot in California I felt at ease. The people were so welcoming; this exceptional country made me feel alive and seen. There was nothing wrong with me I learnt, but there was a lot wrong with the status of women in the Australia I had grown up in. Our three years in America from 1966-69 were transformative in every possible way.

It was a fascinating period in America’s history culturally and politically which had ramifications worldwide. The Vietnam war was widely disputed; protest and debate were intense. The intellectual life presented opportunities I hadn’t imagined. I loved my film studies.

A new generation of filmmakers transformed the US independent industry creating daring, socially relevant, films which were stylistically diverse and narratively challenging. I viewed movies like The Graduate (Dec 1967), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Bullitt (1968) and counterculture classic Easy Rider (1969), which reflected the turbulent political and social climate of the time. I viewed them with huge excitement. I even met Steve McQueen.

Politically, the times, “they were a changing”. The summer of love (1967) brought 100,000 peaceniks and hippies to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for the presidency again (March 1968) because protest was so widespread. American ghettos were burning. Then Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968. And Robert Kennedy, seen as the one hope remaining for a brighter future by many, was assassinated two months later in June 1968.

Despair settled over America. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s music reverberated with America. “We’ve all gone to look for America." The lyrics say, “Kathy I’m lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping. I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why. Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, they’ve all come to look for America."

With our degrees complete, Don and I with family decided to go looking in Chicago. As we travelled across the country, the Democratic Convention was the focus of serious riots. I spent one year at the University of Chicago where I worked alongside radicals bent on reform, on a Ford Foundation-funded program placing teams of teachers in ghetto schools to support one another in deadly environments. Despite all that had happened in a year of upheaval, there was still conviction and a search for solutions to the deep racial chasm diving America. I was deeply committed to that program.

But we were Australian and we returned to see what impact we could make in our own country.

In my role as head of the Media Centre at La Trobe University, I continued to make connections in America which were inspirational, with The East West Centre in Hawaii where I collaborated on projects on communication policy throughout the 70s. I was a visiting professor teaching at the University of Iowa in 1980. I lived among many people of diverse ethnic origins who had made their homes in America and believed in the American dream. I travelled through most states and saw the magnificent landscapes of America. I made life-long friends who have influenced the person I am. I have a great love for America and the fight it helped instil in me.

But just look at it now. The explanations for the rise of Trump are tangled in the very culture that attracted so many, now exhibiting an underbelly with decline and rot. But there remains something utterly unique about America. It is an exciting, seething mix of the best and the worst that human beings can extrude. It is unique and should not fail.

One version of the story is that the big tech guys, voracious in their pursuit of material success and power, are in charge. They are an uneducated bunch in any cultural sense and empathy and goodwill are not part of their vision. If we are not an active participant in their plans, we can become Soylent green – the fertiliser from dead bodies in the AI future.

With an exception. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a man not widely known, was the computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at CERN, along with key web technologies like HTTP, HTML, and URLs. He did the spadework, holding no copyright, that has enabled Meta, Google, Palantir, Open AI et al — the oligarchs who did not share Berners-Lee’s vision for a free and open web — to turn his technological achievement into a playground for their own nefarious nihilism.

Sir Tim became disillusioned when they monetised his platform by bundling data and selling to advertisers the private lives of the 70% of the world’s population who use the Web. Yet, he remains an optimist, arguing in his recent biography, This is for Everyone, that there is still time to slay the hydra-headed monster that has polarised society, causing mental health problems and exploiting dark places with evil intent.

He believes we face a profound challenge to curb the quest for profit, bring the East and West together and create a system that protects data sovereignty, creating a new web which will put AI to good use.

Sir Tim believes this will be done by hypertext enthusiasts, the online privacy movement, the determination of those who were behind the technology who stepped aside when they saw the abuse their work was subjected to. Decent, smart people are looking at this cataclysm in Trump’s America. Sir Tim is optimistic that American protest could drive us to a better future. I want to believe him.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.