I’m reading Emerson’s essay Self-Reliance, and in the very first paragraph is something that reminded me of someone we all know.

The paragraph reads thus:

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius… A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.

From the ForeignPolicy.com blog:

I’ve got an idea for Sen. Allard’s the next Congressional hearing on the virtues and dangers of immigration. Call Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, to testify. Ask him if he could fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without the 33,000 non-U.S. citizens currently serving in the military. After all, it is Hispanic soldiers who, according to research by demographers at the University of Pennsylvania, are doing a disproportionately high percentage of the dying in Iraq.

There is, I think, a difference between being an American and being a U.S. Citizen. It may be just a semantic difference to some, but it isn’t to me. A day after 9/11, Le Monde published a headline: "Nous sommes tous Américains."

I'll let the clip speak for itself first.