"I have been but little in," said Ninian hastily...

Jeff Breckenridge: You got a dollar?

Josh Lyman: Yeah.

Jeff Breckenridge: Take it out. Look at the back. The seal, the pyramid, it's unfinished, with the eye of God looking over it, and the words annuit coeptis - he, God, favors our undertaking. The seal is meant to be unfinished, because this country's meant to be unfinished. We're meant to keep doing better. We're meant to keep discussing and debating. And, we're meant to read books by great historical scholars and then talk about them...

This discussion comes at the end of the West Wing episode "Six Meetings Before Lunch". Breckenridge and Lyman are talking about a book Breckenridge has written an endorsement for, which argues that Black Americans deserve reparations for slavery. The White House wants to appoint Breckenridge as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, but Lyman (the WH Deputy Chief of Staff) is dreading a confirmation battle where he has to defend a nominee who supports slavery reparations. They spend much of the episode debating the issue of reparations, at the end of which Breckenridge points out that no amount of money can make up for kidnapping an entire civilization and selling them into slavery. He doesn't support monetary reparations, not because it's too much but because it's too little--handing over a sum of money would be too easy, too simple to wipe out a wrong of such consequence. But he believes the issue still needs to be debated, so people will think about it, and so people will never again do something so awful.

There are many things that I love about my country. One of them is that it's a work in progress. It began with a revolution, and it's never looked back. We keep growing and changing, making mistakes and trying to overcome them. Some of us (I like to think most of us) keep trying to make it a better country with every generation, while preserving the things we've done that were right all along.

Two points here. We cannot ever, ever afford to make the same mistake twice. One of our saving graces is that we learn from our mistakes. We have to keep doing that. So we have to always remember our past, not through a haze of hagiography, but with a clear-eyed, honest gaze of serious self-appraisal. History, people: good history is crucial to the functioning of democracy. You have to know where you've come from to know who you are and where you're going.

The other is this: debate is important. Debate is healthy. It makes us struggle to defend what we believe in, so as to make sure we still believe in it. But it has to be honest debate. One of the cancers of our political system is the readiness with which many of our leaders are willing to lie in order to persuade people to support them. Tolerance is one of the cardinal virtues of our society, but we need to be intolerant of those who seek to lead us with lies, to fashion a political mandate with falsehood. There is no place in American government for those who are not prepared to be honest with the American people, and we need to make that clear to those who want us to elect them to office.

One of my friends posted a link to this story in the Post about the erosion of civil liberties in the US. I started to reply, and then realised that it would perhaps be more appropriate to post my response here than co-opt his entry.

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Today I'm thankful for being who and where I am: for being an American.

I don't say that very often. It's partly a political thing: conservatives, especially those of the less thoughtful and reflective variety, are so quick to wrap themselves in the flag that I think those who have a more liberal attitude shy away from identifying as patriots. There's certainly a perception that one can't love one's country and criticize it at the same time. I think that's nonsense. It seems to me that those who have high expectations for our country are always going to be critical exactly because we want our country to live up to its lofty ideals. That doesn't mean we don't love it, any more than a parent who pushes their child to work hard and excel out of love for and confidence in their kid.

In fact, while we hear a lot about the Founding Fathers (not so much, sadly about the Mothers), I think we all need to recognize that every American is still a father or mother to his or her country. Because our nation is the sum total of who we are and what we believe and do. If we believe in, or accept, racism, bigotry, corruption, torture, injustice...that's what American will stand for. If we strive for openness, honesty, fair dealing, justice, tolerance, and mutual respect--even for those with whom we disagree...then those values will represent America; that is what America will be.

We have a beautiful country, full of the wonders of nature and all the things that human ingenuity and creativity can devise. We have a country filled with honest, hard-working people who are strong in their faith (whether it be religious or secular) and believe in justice tempered with mercy. We have an ethos that says that people who strive can achieve; not "get rich quick with no work" but "work hard, play by the rules, and you can make a better life for you and your family". I'd like our country to be famous for those things, not for their antithesis.

I talk a lot about how I much I want to live abroad and how much I like other countries. That isn't because I don't love my own or feel that it's an important part of whom I am. I woke up in a warm bed, had breakfast from food I bought in a store filled with food and drink that almost anyone can afford to buy, connected to the world through the Internet, got in my car and drove to the school my county built to educate children for free, voted for my government's leaders, and then drove to work over well-paved streets through well-regulated traffic, without being stopped or harassed by anyone. I'll go home at the end of the day and--barring a very unusual disaster--my home will still be there, undisturbed. I'll cook dinner using cheap and consistently available electricity and clean water, watch the news, and go so sleep in my own bed. There are so many people around the world who can't do some, most, or any of those things. I can do them all thanks, in large part, to living where and when I do.

I don't beleive that being an American makes me superior to anyone. But I believe it gives me opportunities that others don't have. So I am thankful for being an American.

There are a lot of things that bother me about my country, but there are a lot of things that make me proud of it too.

So many of our deficiencies are the ways we fall short of the high ideals that we measure ourselves against. We have a constitution, including our bill of rights, that is the model and the envy of many other nations. We have one of the world's strongest economies and highest standards of living, even if they are a bit shaky right now. We have one of the most diverse populations imaginable, and we expand it every year by taking in more immigrants than most other nations combined.

We've produced poets and novelists, playwrights and composers, songwriters and musicians. We've plumbed some pretty dark depths, but we've taken those experiences and formed rich and wonderful creations from them. We've raised scientists and engineers who have lofted us into the heavens, split the atom, built the Internet, harnessed electricity, and conquered diseases. Our architects have designed and erected marvelous works--cathedrals and temples of stone and glass, legislatures of marble and bridges of steel, towers in which to live and work that are so tall they scrape the sky, monuments that are so beautiful or impressive or simply improbable that people come from around the round world to see them.

We have great and towering mountains, wide and fertile plains, deep and shadowy forests, rivers that roll for thousands and thousands of miles through an incredible diversity of lands. We have rocky coasts and sandy beaches. We have taiga and tundra, grassland and savannah, the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts and the Great Dismal Swamp. Our country is so wide, people on the other side of it will just be unfolding themselves from sleep waking up and starting the coffee long after I've finished writing this.

Our automotive industry is faltering on the edge of insolvency and our steel industry crashed and burned decades ago--but both are still more productive than any but those of China and Japan. We are second only to the UK in the number of new books published yearly. We produce more corn than any other country, and we are among the top growers of wheat and oats. We're still one of the leading producers of cloth and clothing. The computers of the world run on software created here. Our actors and directors and cinematographers entertain audiences from Malmo to Madagascar and from Togo to Tokyo.

My country has a lot of faults and flaws, many problems it has to solve. But it has much to be thankful for and to be proud of as well.

Happy birthday, United States of America. I love you.

A satire on how bad Canadian health care is provokes an angry defense of US healthcare from poorly informed Americans ... and a Canadian.

Human Rights Watch has appealed to Saudi Arabia to halt the execution of a woman convicted of witchcraft.

In a letter to King Abdullah, the rights group described the trial and conviction of Fawza Falih as a miscarriage of justice.

The illiterate woman was detained by religious police in 2005 and allegedly beaten and forced to fingerprint a confession that she could not read.

And our former moral high ground on issues like this is where?

Oh, right. Nowhere. Because a Supreme Court justice has said the torture is OK if the information obtained is important enough.

It's getting hard to tell which are the bad guys and which are the good guys.