Dear America: I Love You

Dear America,

Happy 240^th birthday.  I write about you often, but I haven’t written to you in a very long time.  Perhaps it just took me this long to build up the courage to tell you how much I love you.

America, I have never denied my infatuation for your physical beauty.  From the rocky beaches of your Massachusetts shoreline, to the stunning, snow-shrouded volcanic peaks of Washington and from the swaying grasses of your plains to the stark, breathtaking magnificence of a dawn’s early light setting flame to the red rocks of New Mexico’s finger mesas… you are glorious.  I have reveled in your ancient sequoias, laughed at the parrots in Florida’s trees, journeyed to find the serenity on your misty Pacific beaches, and held my breath when a bald eagle hung motionless in the wind a hundred feet above my head.

Just looking at you, even in photographs, it is not surprising that the world sees your beauty as I do.  I have been blessed throughout my 52 years to see you in real time, to soak you into my soul, to gaze upon you, sink my toes into your warm sands, and call you “Home.”

However, your beauty is sometimes skin deep, America; and, I have not been able to overlook some of your faults.  In many ways, you are like a young adult who grew up rich, but rough.  Like all of us, you were spawned by passion.  Your parents defiantly demanded freedom to think and do and believe what they could not deny within themselves.  They put their bodies and souls into you, lived and willingly died to bring the bright spark of your spirit into a universe that was starving for what you are.  You were born into a violent world, America.  The moments before your birth were terrible – so hazardous that your first breath and cry were a miracle.

But, that cry was a call to arms and you fought for every teetering baby step you took.  With a rock and a stick clenched in your young hands, you raged against anyone who threatened your existence.  Your historic histrionics, always indulgently encouraged by your family, were ugly and dangerous.  Dangerous, America, because you were and often still are, a big, stubborn baby.  While your stubbornness served you well in surviving your childhood, it is that intractability and violence that have caused me to throw up my hands in frustration and despair. 

Your youth and adolescence were a mix of prideful moments and crushing embarrassments to our family.  We were raised in the same house and taught fundamentals of equality, tolerance, and the kind of freedom that ends at the tip of my neighbor’s nose.  Yet, amidst the double-standards of your house, we have had to fight for every one of the rights to life, liberty and happiness.  America, you were the kind of parent who made us stand up for ourselves and maybe we should be grateful for the hard-working toughness that courses through our veins.

I also know my life lessons left me resentful and critical of you at times.  You are hypocritical, America.  The lessons of your parents were often lost upon you.  You swaggered around empirically, claiming “rights” that you had not earned.  As a big, brutish teenager you self-proclaimed privileges with brutal force, exploding into places you did not belong with criminal negligence.  You have terrorized and murdered innocent people in the name of a god they neither knew nor wanted.  You stole, burned and pillaged.  Oh, America!  Shame on you.  You shamed all of us.

And just as we think we can bear no more of this behavior, we see your sweet, vulnerable, gentle heart.  When nature rises, you come in charitable grace offering your steady, generous hands to a world in need.  Your tears of sorrow, your deep wells of kindness, your unshakable optimism, your belief that no task is impossible… At those times when we have been on our knees, America, you lifted us up with justice, and rightness, and compassion.  We found comfort in the sweet faces of our neighbors and the admiration of the world.  In the darkest of disasters you told the world: “We’re okay.”  To us, you were the voice of a loving mother to a crying child who softly and firmly said: “Get up.  You can do this.  Those people out there are waiting for you.  Be brave.  Stand up now.”  And we do stand, all of us, together.

America, with all of your faults and hypocrisy, I claim you.  Your stubborn courage is in me as surely as I am in you.  To stay angry at you would be a poison to my own soul; and I, like you, have no intention of dying today.  So, in a tribute to you on your birthday, I will stand up for rightness, equality, peace, and for the weakest members of our family just as you taught me to do in this place called “Home.”  I will stand with those who stand for you even when they are on their knees.  I will extend my hands and heart to our neighbors in the hours of their desperation.   I will open the doors of the home of the free to those brave enough to enter it peacefully.  I will be the embodiment of the beautiful lessons of your parents and mine.

America, beautiful America, I love you.  Happy birthday.