{"id":18052,"date":"2016-11-10T17:50:12","date_gmt":"2016-11-10T22:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=18052"},"modified":"2016-11-10T17:50:12","modified_gmt":"2016-11-10T22:50:12","slug":"what-makes-america-beautiful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=18052","title":{"rendered":"What makes America beautiful?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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?<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

\n\u201cGive me your tired, your poor,
\nYour huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
\nThe wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
\nSend these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
\nI lift my lamp beside the golden door.\u201d\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “What makes America beautiful?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18052"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18052"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18052\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18053,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18052\/revisions\/18053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}