“What does it mean to love a country?”
Pulitzer Prize winning author Marilynne Robinson had me with her very first sentence.
And I’ll wager that she will “have” you as well – from “love a country” – to the very end of her soulful New York Times meditation,
Ms.Robinson presents our country as:
America, the idea.
America, a family.
America, the experiment.
From her summation:
“Leaders perish but the people have relative immortality. Therefore the first order of business for us as a people is to find our way back to equilibrium. If Joe Biden wins, we will in no doubt see in part a restoration of the old order. That order had many flaws and quarrels, but it had also, we now know, a loving deference toward the Constitution and the laws.If we learn anything from this sad passage in our history it should be that rage and contempt are a sort of neutron bomb in the marketplace of ideas, obviating actual competition. …
“This country was, from the outset, a tremendous leap of faith. … There is much to be done, more than inevitably limited people can see at a give moment. But the other side of our limitation is the fact that it carries with it a promise that we still might see a new birth of freedom, and another one beyond that.
“Democracy is the great instrument of human advancement. We have no right to fail it.”
Don’t Give Up on America.
Vote.