We are a rarity in the world. We have turned down dark paths in our history, but we have always tried to right ourselves by remembering the principles that America was founded upon.
Patti Davis
03.04.17 10:15 PM ET
When I was a kid, I found my father’s love for America embarrassing. He would get misty-eyed at the National Anthem. His hand over his heart was more than just a required gesture; it seemed as if he was recording every beat, every movement of blood, timing it to the cadence of the music. The sight of the flag would make him pause, retreat to some soft acre of thoughts and dreams.
As I got older, I came to respect his patriotism, even though I disagreed in large part with his politics, particularly in the Sixties when the Vietnam War was raging and a friend of mine joined the Marines, writing me heartbreaking letters about the carnage in that faraway land. Respecting someone’s feelings, however, isn’t the same as identifying with them. I never teared up at any of America’s well known anthems, or at the sight of the flag.
That changed on 9/11. By then, my father was deep into Alzheimer’s and mostly bedridden. On that somber, unwieldy morning, I drove to my parents’ house and saw, on the corner of a busy intersection, a homeless man waving a tattered American flag. The tears that overtook me made it impossible to drive; I had to pull over until they let up. They came from a place so deep in me, I thought they might have been waiting for me all my life. I wept for the country that I knew I’d taken for granted. I wept for the people who had gone to work on that clear blue day, or boarded a plane, never thinking that such horror could visit us here in the land of the free. People who would never see tomorrow.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/03/05/is-ronald-reagan-s-vision-for-america-dead.html
