After all these years we are still a great happy mess of conflicting impulses. Now more than ever.
We are a polyglot nation. A hundred cultures all trying to act like one; sometimes failing spectacularly, but overall, I think we do it better than anyone. If you don’t watch the news, you would never know that some of us don’t get along.
We are the secular left, and we are the religious right, and we are everything in between. We are capitalists and socialists and libertarians. We are the isolationists, and we are the interventionists. We are second amendment hawks, and we are passivists doves. Free speech is our mother’s milk, (like no other nation on earth), yet we spend so much time complaining about everyone’s speech.
We are the hotdog eating contestants and we are the vegans. We are the pudgiest, most well-fed people in history, and we are obsessed with diet and exercise. We are beach bums and city slickers and country bumpkins. We have the power to conquer the largest empire ever conceived, yet we have no desire for such a thing. We are generally happy and wish the world no harm.
We laugh easily and smile a lot. We look people in the eye. We tend to be naïve and say what we think. We wear our heart on our sleeve, because most of us are without guile, we can afford to be. We work more hours and use less vacation days than most other industrialized nations. We like to work because a 21 trillion-dollar economy doesn’t build itself. We are relentlessly optimistic; we just assume things are always going to get better. We are generous almost to a fault, because we always assume that we can go out and get more money. Prosperity is our birthright. Half of the world loves to complain about us, and the other half is willing to risk their lives to get here.
We are southern charm. We are northern efficiency. We are midwestern politeness. We are east coast attitude and west coast chill. We are Florida sunshine and Alaska crab boats. We have more different kinds of food than anywhere else in the world. I know that we created the Kardashians; but we also gave the world Herman Melville, and Jonathan Edwards, and Edgar Allan Poe, and Mark Twain.
We are mega-churches, we are cathedrals, we are Hindu temples, and Muslim mosques, and Jewish synagogues. We are the Kiwanis, and the VFW, and a thousand other community service organizations.
I know we have our faults, past and present. To hear some people, there seems to be nothing good about us. But I do love this place, and her people. I pray for her every day, she needs it.
So tomorrow, let’s forget our differences; let’s lay down our rhetorical weapons. Let’s put up our feet and raise a glass to our grand experiment; a nation built on an idea, not a tribe.
Love God.
Love your neighbor.
Peace.