This is an American thing, but that’s what my mom told me at bedtime when I was pregnant. This is my history with a lot of Americans. You know, a lot of people I don’t know, the rest of them aren’t American. It's something about who they are, the choices they’re making. Yeah, it’s American, but it’s not American anymore, so I’m just trying to figure out if I can do this again.”

The way she said it is so different from what most Americans are familiar with. One of my favorite descriptions from my college days was something as short as “that’s not what Americans are,” but then again, so am I.

What I was trying to describe was people like you and me. We both know that America is so much richer and more diverse in the world than our closest continental neighbors. And we both realize that we have that.

There’s a lot of ways to think about America, and I’ll talk about a few. And I’m just going to go through a few from the many different viewpoints. Let’s begin with the United States. There was another America which did things we Americans never thought of before. And that was America at its best. A lot of the ways we could say it was better