America the Beautiful

 Annamaria on Monday 

"Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove."

Most of you will recognize the words from Shakespeare's Sonnet 116.  I offer them as an explanation, both to myself and to all of you, to explain why I am loving my country so deeply at this dire moment.

Typically, my feelings of patriotism are strongest for my City of New York.  I regularly walk around feeling great about the place where I live.  But today I am filled with love for the USA, for what it has always stood for to me.

I am the grandchild of four immigrants from Italy, including my maternal grandmother who arrived at age three in the arms of her parents.  My grandparents  were all profoundly grateful for the new start America gave them.  They raised their children to love the USA.  Their sons (eight in total) all volunteered to fight for the USA in WWII.

My mother's brother and my godfather. John Pisacane-

who fought in Patton's Army in Sicily and Anzio and

was killed during the push to Berlin.

I love my country despite its flaws.  My love is for America, the only functioning democracy created after an armed revolution against a tyrant.  All the others pretty quickly turned into a bloodbath or a dictatorship or both.  Think of the others--the French, the Russia, the Cuban, the Chinese...

My sacred document is the United States Constitution. 

My love is for the America that is, at this moment, trying to become a better functioning multicultural, multiracial, multi-religious, multi-everything democracy--the only one on the planet.

Sound impossible?  Not to me.

My beautiful City of New York already functions that way.  500 languages are spoken here.  The hands holding onto the poles on the subway are in all the colors human skin comes in.  We live and let live. But if a person falls down, the people nearby converge to help, regardless of social background or sexual preference of the person who fell.  And then the concerned fellow New Yorkers disappear into the crowd when help is no longer needed.

I want to shout at the rest of the country: "BE LIKE US." 

At this point in time, the rest of the country is fighting with itself.

Here we are at this critical moment. And what I feel is love.

And I offer this prayer.

Here are the words by Katharine Lee Bates, an English professor at Wellesley College.

I have rearranged sequence, putting the third stanza first, as the brilliant Ray Charles did.  Somehow he saw that the heroes would have to prove themself again at this moment: 

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine,
Till all success be nobleness,
And every gain divine!

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

My prayer is for those who are standing up now, as my father and my uncles did.  Today's Americans are at this moment the "heroes proved in liberating strife, who more than self their country love and mercy more than life.

America! America!."