We are America

We are America. We define ourselves with heroism and hubris; with amazing acts of foresight and courage…and with stubborn acts of self-righteous anger and unthinking cruelty. We define ourselves with pride and piety, with patriotism and prejudice. We stand tall…titans walking the halls of history like we owned them.

We are buoyed by our triumphs and hardly slowed by our setbacks. We are America. And we are defined by our swords and our ploughshares…by our often noble hearts and our sometimes ignoble lusts…by love and honor, hate and folly…by our welcoming arms and our willingness to exact a price for being different.

And, undeniably, we are defined by tragedy. We celebrate our heroes and wise men, our victories and breakthroughs but we define our history…we define ourselves…most often through the bittersweet prisms of tragedy, loss, and, we hope and pray, redemption.

From the arrival of the first slave ship in the fledgling Colonies to the takeoff of the last helicopter from Saigon…from the blood on the streets of colonial Boston to the blood on the sands of the storied Middle East…our history, our very national identity, is constantly being forged in a crucible of pain and tragedy…a litany of names, dates, events, and places that both inform and define us as a people:

The Boston Massacre…the War Between the States…Manifest Destiny…Ford’s Theater…the Little Big Horn…the Great Depression…December 7, 1941…Hiroshima…Dealy Plaza…Malcolm and Martin and Bobby…Wounded Knee…Kent State…Watergate…Challenger…the Alfred P. Murrah Building…

September 11, 2001.


Blood and fire mixing with anguish and resolve…names and dates and places (those mentioned and so very many more)…instants forever seared into the collective conscious…we are America, defined by sacrifice and greed…by righteousness and infamy…by triumph and, so very often, by tragedy…by all that which makes us, in all of our flawed, wondrous glory, so very alive…so very human…so very American.

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