Americans tend to see themselves as divided. The rest of the world sees us as all too united. From chants of "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" and "We're No. 1!" at the Olympics to national identification with individual victims of tragedy (a fire, bus crash, a single murder in Aruba), to thrilling to a brilliant rendition of the national anthem by Whitney Houston, to a hundred other ways, we show every day that we have gone much further toward national oneness than the partisans among us acknowledge. You can't expect 300 million people to have a single mind. But on one thing everyone seems to agree. Despite differences in politics, religion, race, sexual orientation, or any other particularity, we are all bound together by one thing above all others: the national credo set out in the Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, Gettysburg Address, and all those other best words of our best selves. What exactly they mean is where we divide, but that we all believe in the great experiment the Founders set us upon is what holds us together past the many bad times to the ever-better times. Nothing else unites us. Nothing else could.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:44 PM