On the 4th of July: "I’m proud of my country, and blessed to be an American. It took living in the Middle East for me to realize this. But every time I stand for the national anthem or the pledge of allegiance and I put my hand over my heart and I look around at everyone around me, I can’t help but think about how nationalism is a coercive ideology, and all the nationalistic hoopla and the self-congratulatory rhetoric, when taken without a grain of salt, can have a tendency to shout down the other patriots, the ones who have the courage to speak out critically and the lucidity to envision our better future differently than we might have wanted or expected.

There’s a lot of work to do, and we should never let that simple fact slip from sight, because it’s how we ensure that the dream of a land of the free with liberty and justice for all has not merely become a beautiful, dangerous farce.

Yes, there’s a lot of work to do, and the magnitude and multiplicity of the tasks at hand oblige us to work in slow, small, humble ways; but that’s how it always has been, how it always will be, and God willing we’ll give it our best.

Happy Birthday America." --A slightly younger Me in 2010