To me, this is America.
To me, America should be celebrating the beautiful diversity of our country. It should be celebrating that people come from different backgrounds and experiences. It should be recognizing that people look and act different from each other and being amazed at how wonderful that is.
To me, America should be about remembering that we’re a country of immigrants. It should be about embracing our friends, neighbors, and family members who are recent immigrants, who put everything on the line to come here. It should be about opening our arms to those who still want to come.
To me, America should be about facing up to the dark and difficult times in the past. It should be about recognizing that so often our government has and continues to harm people who look and act differently than those in power. It should be about visiting the Native American and African American museums in Washington D.C. and not looking away when they get to the hard parts. It should be about looking those experiences hard in the eye and saying, “Yes, that did happen.”
To me, America should be about changing unjust systems even when we ourselves are flawed. The Founding Fathers were far from perfect – some were downright monstrous – and yet wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” They argued that they should not be under royal rule even while denying that to other people. And yet, they created the founding documents of our country with a way to change them. And yet, they built a way to shift those foundations into the very fabric of our country, to change them and change them over and over again as we learn and grow as a people.
To me, America should be about constantly striving to live up to our own ideals. It should be about failing and then getting back up and trying do better. It should be about finding new and better and more just ways to do things.
This Independence Day, this is the America I want to celebrate with my children. People may say because I protest some of our government’s policies, that I’m not patriotic. People may say because I disagree mightily with the President that I’m not patriotic. People may say because I talk about the horrible things our government and people have done to others in the past and present that I’m not patriotic.
But I do what I do because I’m patriotic. I love my country and want it to be so much better than it could be. I believe it could be so much better than it is.
This is America to me. It may not be what we are now and definitely have not been in the past, but it’s what we could be in the future. That future is what I think of when I wave the American flag this and every Independence Day.
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