We cannot meet the challenge of this moment without a reactivation of our moral imagination. (Plus a reminder about next week’s book club…)

(John Hudson)

This weekend I’m in Paris, where today I saw an original 1/16-scale bronze version of the Statue of Liberty at the Musee D’Orsay. I felt rather numb gazing at it, thinking of all the memes over the last few year or so of Lady Liberty bent over weeping. With our 250th birthday only weeks away, we have much to consider….about our country….and about ourselves.

Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, the designer and sculptor of the Statue of Liberty, said these words in 1898:

The experience of the old is not a motor: it is only a lamppost, warning against dangers; the light that illuminates the long path ahead is you, the youth, who are holding its torch; it is you who are to illuminate the future and its obscurities.

We’re living in that future now, and to say it’s filled with obscurities is an understatement. Never has there been a more important moment to consider America’s meaning. Not just our policies, our economy, or even our history. Our meaning. That, more than anything else – should we embrace it an understand it – will carry us through this awful hour.

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On the base of the Statue of Liberty is inscribed the poem The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus. Poet and activist Lazarus dedicated her poem to the refugees she was aiding at the time, applying for asylum from anti-Semitic pogroms in Eastern Europe. It’s worth reading every word of the poem, slowly and aloud to yourself. I’ll warn you now that it might break your heart.

THE NEW COLOSSUS

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

It’s worth asking, what has happened to us? We have gone from that poem…to concentration camps. Literally. To concentration camps. To Dilley in Texas, and Delaney Hall in New Jersey, and Alligator Alcatraz in Florida. Nothing could be more of a spit in the face to Lady Liberty, to Emma Lazarus, or to every brave American before us who has struggled and sacrificed for this country. Yet the darkness those detainment camps represent – and all the other assaults on our freedom today – will not prevail.

Millions of Americans are making sure Lady Liberty’s torch is held high, and we will continue to. From people protesting in the streets of Minneapolis, to judges all over the country who are standing up to the Administration’s corruption and criminality, to every American who will stand up for our democracy on November 3rd, her light has not gone out. And it will never go out, as long as it lives in us.