 | american super hero |
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We are living in the land of the free, the land where anything is possible, the land of the immigrant’s dream, the land with the storied past forgotten in the rush to the imagined future, the land that repairs and reinvents itself, the land where a person can escape the consequences of a self-centered youth and know the satisfaction of sacrificing for an ideal, the land where you can go from aimless rebellion to a noble cause, and from the bottom of your class to your party’s nomination for president.
We are blessed, and we have been a blessing to humanity in turn. The international order we helped build from the ashes of world war, and that we defend to this day, has liberated more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history. This wondrous land has shared its treasures and ideals and shed the blood of its finest patriots to help make another, better world. And as we did so, we made our own civilization more just, freer, more accomplished and prosperous than the America that existed when I watched my father go off to war on December 7, 1941.
To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.
We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil. We are the custodians of those ideals at home, and their champion abroad. We have done great good in the world. That leadership has had its costs, but we have become incomparably powerful and wealthy as we did. We have a moral obligation to continue in our just cause, and we would bring more than shame on ourselves if we don’t. We will not thrive in a world where our leadership and ideals are absent. We wouldn’t deserve to.
Taken from John McCain’s speech when receiving the Liberty Medal Award Ceremony from the National Constitution Center in 2017.
[full text]
UNDER the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you ‘grave for me: 5
Here he lies where he long’d to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
Thank you, Angela, for taking time on your blog to honor this true American hero. One of the last, perhaps.
McCain was everything a politician should be. He put his country and its people over politics. He spoke his mind and his heart, not kowtowing to political pressure.
He walked the way he talked. Politicians of both parties respected him for his honesty, his love of country and his deep commitment to the American dream.
We will be less, because he is gone.
John McCain wore no masks. He made mistakes (can you spell “palin?”), but admitted them and learned from them. He really lived the sentence from Kennedy’s inaugural address: “ask not what your country can do for you, etc.”
McCain was an amazing fellow. I wasn’t a fan of his politics but I respect anyone that endured what he went through after he was shot down. I also admired his independence. There isn’t much of that left in our divided, lock step politics. But you wrote more than an epitaph for McCain. I think you were reaffirming some of the things about America that McCain underwent torture to uphold. These days especially we need to remember what America has been and what it can be. We need to remember our better angels.