“Now, are we a people or are we an idea? We’re both. That’s the honest answer. We are a people with a story, a language, a history — and we are a creed that anyone can join. That’s the miracle of it. A Taiwanese boy eats his first cheeseburger and decides he’s moving to the country that invented it, and twenty-five years later, he’s a citizen, married to an American, and an ordained minister standing before his church thanking God for 250 years of this nation. He loves this country more than the tenured cynics who were born here and can’t stand it. I’ll take a thousand of him. When you bind yourself to the ideal, you become one of the people. No other country on earth has ever really offered that. To this day, none does.” ewerickson.substack.com/p/th…