We/Us/our... Mine is a nation of the first person plural. The country which I, by accident of birth and not by planning on the part of my parents, came to live in freely on the twelfth day of September, nineteen-hundred-thirty-five, whose citizenship and protection I inherited, having sworn no allegiance to any party. On the day that I was born, at home, not in a hospital, I became a person. Because I was well loved from my first day in that family.. actually adored by my parents and by nurturing grandparents, uncles and aunts, and neighbors, and because their citizenship in America was never in question, neither was mine. I grew through childhood assuming everybody was a person and that with personhood everybody enjoyed protection and security in the context of a family, neighborhood, and country. My assumptions about freedom and protection and security were based on my experience as a person whose personhood and innate worth were considered to be equal to but not superior to the personhood of other persons. I kept right on believing it... until... until I moved out into the world where not every person is free.

I confess here that the first teacher who introduced me to e.e. cummings and his poem about america and god obviously didn’t see the irony in it and neither did I.

Now I do.

e.e. cummings

"next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water