Peg O’ My Heart
Writing by treason on Friday, 29 of June , 2007 at 7:10 pm
“So it’s home again and home again, America for me.
My heart is turning home again, and there I long to be.
In the land of youth and freedom beyond the ocean bars
Where the air is full of sunlight, and the flag is full of stars.”
We’re coming up on a birthday. I don’t think Hallmark makes a card for a 231st anniversary of a birth, but it doesn’t really matter. We don’t have to go out and search for one before Wednesday: Peggy Noonan has done the work for us. In her column, she captures precisely what it is some of us have been trying to say throughout this debate on immigration reform. No, we’re not racist. No, we’re not xenophobes. No, we’re not nativists. No, we’re not heartless. We’re quite the opposite, really.
Peggy simply writes about the process of becoming an American. “Anyone can become ‘American’” she says, “but they have to want to first.” It’s sort of like intervention, then. You have to want it. And you have to be willing to give something up to get what you want.
She writes about what it meant for immigrants like her grandparents and mine to “cast their lot.” To make that “decision” that would change their lives, our lives, and the life of a nation. A nation that is coming up on a birthday.
I’m reminded of the things my grandparents gave up when they made the decision to cast their lot, and I think about my uncles who enlisted in different branches of the U.S. military to fight a war against the country where their parents had started their lives. But there was no angst. My uncles were born here – their lot had been cast. My mother’s family was American and had no allegiance to “the old country” or to the fascist who was running it.
Peggy Noonan has once again grasped it. Again, just one more reason I love the woman.
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