07.24.2002 - 10:32 a.m.

If you ever go to New York, you should see the Statue of Liberty. And not just from the ferry- you should go to the actual island and see the statue.

I don�t know what it is. I guess it might have been the perspective- it�s a completely different experience from below. On TV you always see it from above, like in the Michael Jackson video or the X-Men movie. On TV it always looks so huge.

It is big, but not that big. It�s only forty-some feet tall, plus the pedestal. Except for the iron supports, it�s only two pennies thick. Two pennies.

It might also be the tour, hearing about its design, all the trouble people went through to get it here, the point they were trying to make. That poem, �Give me your tired, your poor�� The people who made that statue happen truly believed that America could free the world. I could see that the ranger giving the tour believed it, too.

Anyway, after the tour, I looked up at her face and thought, Oh, okay. I get it now. I had a moment, if only a brief one, when I understood patriotism. All the crap the politicians spout, the tattered plastic flags stuck in car windows, the endless souvenir shops and street vendors� carts full of metal-coated plastic keychains and �I heart NY� t-shirts can, at some level, be traced to a kind of faith, a deeper meaning than �Buy my stuff� or �I think I�m cool.�

I doubt I will ever be a patriotic person. But at least now, I can understand why someone would be.

-stonebridge

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