AMERICA IS THE NAME OF OUR DREAM: Amazing, must-read post here. I expect I disagree radically with the author on what our country needs now. We likely disagree on questions of right and wrong that will remain crucial long after Americans are fairy tales in books written by rabbits. But this is exactly right:

“America compells people to leave everything, to give up everything, to be terrified and impoverished and exhausted and belittled, humiliated and bereaved, because it promises that one day, your daughter who is only two years old will be able to be a student in an American university and work on Capitol Hill during the summers. It makes you not care that your fingers are stuck in the closed door of the El train when you take her to the clinic for her annual dental checkup. It makes you walk to work in the snow after the car is stolen so that she can go to the babysitter with the dog named Barney, after you realize that the old ones kept her locked in a room upstairs. It makes you furious and crazy and wild, dangerous, desperate, and amazing. It makes you amazing. America makes you do things.

“In its conception, America was a furious dream, and when you are not a child of its luxuries from birth, you see that in all its wideness.”

read the whole thing

I wrote a hugely scattershot and not nearly as moving thing here on similar themes.