In the words of Cornel West --
To
understand your country, you must love it. To love it, you must, in a
sense, accept it. To accept it as how it is, however is to betray it.
To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that
in it which shows what it might become. America - this monument to the
genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes
capacity, this long, halting turn of the no into the yes, needs
citizens who love it enough to reimagine and remake it.
(from Unger and West, The Future of American Progressivism, 93, 1998; via Ghost in the Machine)
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