Finally I Hear a Politician Explain My Country Just the Way I Understand It - The Atlantic: That’s what America is. Not stock photos or airbrushed history, or feeble attempts to define some of us as more American than others.
We respect the past, but we don’t pine for the past. We don’t fear the future; we grab for it. America is not some fragile thing. We are large, in the words of Whitman, containing multitudes. We are boisterous and diverse and full of energy, perpetually young in spirit.