A nice thing or two.

I don't want to just be howling into the void right now, that is coming but tonight I want to put up a couple things I found nice or uplifting lately.

First is about my cat, on my way home from work she often runs out to say hi to me, but the other day she met me about a block away from the house, ran up to me making happy greeting meows, and submitted to about two seconds of head scratching before heading briskly towards home, tail pointed straight up, when she realized I wasn't following as fast as she thought I should be, she stopped, came back a few steps, and made impatient noises at me until I caught up, this repeated until we reached our yard and she allowed a couple more head scratches before heading out on her own business, apparently she was just making sure I could find the house. It is nice to be cared about.


The other thing I have on my mind is a bit more relevant to the world today:

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!"

"The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus.

I've written a bit about it in this space before, I am not a poetry fan generally but to me no other words evoke a pride and sadness in my country like these do.
They talk of an ideal of America that maybe never really existed, and yet inspired millions all the same, an ideal that we have rarely if ever lived up to and is central to the debate of our image as a country today.
But for all that failure, all the wasted potential, even in 1883 when the sonnet was written, they aren't really lies exactly either it's just... there are two Americas, the one described above, in the writings of the founding fathers, and in the minds of patriots and immigrants, who more often than not are the same thing. That one is the ideal that outsiders hope to see when they immigrate, it isn't real, but there are tantalizing fragments of it everywhere, enough to keep the image alive in the eyes of the world to this day. Then there is the America that actually exists, and fails spectacularly to live up to the ideals of the other one.

But just because we fail doesn't mean we stop trying, it's hope for better that brings people here and inspired the poem, and if we stop trying to be better than we will have failed the ideal America even more than those who would have us isolate from the world and exclude those who are different.