For the last two days I have been thinking long and hard about what it is about America that makes me the most proud. Can we look past our short-term failures as a nation, to ask why we are a wonderful and noble experiment that helps to make this world a better place?
And I realized that everything I love about this country was best summed up by Emma Lazarus, within her poem “The New Colossus”, at the base of the Statue of Liberty:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
If I needed one reason to show that America is something glorious, it would be this: That sometimes — not always, but sometimes — our nation remembers to live up to that beautiful idea.