As this community celebrates the Fourth of July I see not just an easy patriotism, red, white and blue as that may be. I see our faces. Even in this small spot, we mirror the complexity that has become, that always was, America. If you sit around our pool after this parade or on any other summer afternoon, you will hear a wide range of languages; not just English, but Spanish, French, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese among them. If you ask us what we think about anything, you will get the same variety of views as anywhere, from wildly liberal to wildly conservative. We do not just reflect “inside the Beltway-think,” even though many of us, but nowhere near all, are civil servants, or have been. Uniquely, these faces remind me, we are a nation built on an idea—beginning with “…all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness and ending “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor”—for which we have fought and died, which we believe more in principle than always honor in practice. And a nation to which all but a few of us have come, over generations, from somewhere else. We the people make up a nation of immigrants. We forget that to our risk. Yet, on this July Fourth, swirling in the air across our river, our representatives are arguing over an immigration bill that seeks the ultimate safe harbor of citizenship for some among us who have brought their strengths and their beliefs with them but, undocumented, live and work in our shadows. Common wisdom has it that although it passed the Senate, the bill’s chances in the House are slim at best. As I look at the cross-section of America in our microcosm Independence Day parade, I cannot help but wonder how any of us, we who have come from the four corners of the earth, can be unwilling to accept a compromise that would provide a path to citizenship for others already here, not an easy one but a path, to join us. Making the many one is part of what we should mean as we celebrate the Fourth of July. That, in my view, was the original idea. Margaret Sullivan Alexandria, Virginia July 5, 2013
Posted on: Sat, 06 Jul 2013 04:19:53 +0000
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