3 ideas
Rip, an idle, well-liked villager fleeing a scolding wife, climbs into the Catskills, drinks liquor with silent ghostly Dutchmen playing ninepins (Henry Hudson's crew), and sleeps twenty years. He returns to find his wife dead, his friends gone, the inn's portrait of King George repainted as General Washington, and himself nearly mobbed for declaring loyalty to the king at an election.
The new republic swaps the king's portrait for Washington's by repainting the same face with a new coat and name, and the idle loungers at the inn now argue about 'rights of citizens' instead of old gazettes. Seen this way, political upheaval often alters vocabulary, symbols, and loyalties while leaving the texture of daily life and human types largely unchanged.
Someone who misses a transition carries the old consensus intact and is instantly treated as a dangerous deviant for stating what was once obvious, as when Rip's profession of loyalty to King George nearly gets him branded a spy. The mismatch reveals that a community's settled truths are recent, contingent agreements that members quickly forget were ever otherwise.