Glimmers

There are a few glimmers of hope but few and weak. This morning I took a six mile walk with Kara. On our walk every single individual who wished me a happy Fourth of July was an immigrant. Clearly, some immigrants are grateful to be here.

In this piece at RealClearPolitics recent immigrant Irshad Manji relates an account of construction of the Statue of Liberty you may never have heard before:

Lady Liberty’s back story has uncanny parallels with that of my Muslim grandmother. Both women came from Egyptian stock. Both spent years in Europe. Both settled into their final homes after crossing the Atlantic. Above all, both taught me the power of wonder.

Conventional history has it that France presented the Statue of Liberty as a gift to a fellow lover of Enlightenment values, the United States. Well, yes and no. It’s true that a French sculptor, Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, carved the statue. But he conceived of her in Egypt, at the opening of the Suez Canal. Awed by ancient Egyptian architecture and inspired by the canal as a passage to possibility, Bartholdi let loose his imagination. He envisioned a monument, taller than the Sphinx and radiating noor—Arabic for “light”—as ships entered the Suez en route to Asia.

Bartholdi thus knew his mission: to erect “the likeness of an Egyptian peasant woman holding aloft a torch of freedom,” as historian and former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren puts it.

Read the whole thing.

And while you’re at it read this piece by Charles Love at RealClearPolitics:

I want to address my fellow black Americans: This country is as much ours as it is anyone else’s—and it has been since the beginning. Too many blacks believe that America is racist, that it does not foster equality, and that its founding principles do not include all citizens. This is evident in the common reply from some blacks to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” which was, “When was America ever great?”

The answer to this question depends on one’s definition of “great.” If “great” means “perfect,” then former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall’s judgment that our Constitution was “defective from the start” seems true. Yet when measured against other countries—all very far from perfect themselves—America was clearly unique. In the late 18th century, most of the world was ruled by tribal leaders who gained power through conquest or monarchs who inherited power through family lineage and treated citizens as subjects.

The Declaration of Independence was special in how it stated the requirement of a new form of government. It, and the Constitution that followed, turned history on its head. Before the Declaration, leaders created laws to guide how people should act and live. The Declaration argued, by contrast, that man was governed by natural law that comes from “nature’s God.” The primary goal of government should be to protect these natural rights, granted to man by God. The document further stated that the government’s power should be derived from the consent of the governed.

Again, read the whole thing.