July 4-- And The Recent Insurrection

Quotes from Amanda Gorman's Inauguration Poem:

"We've braved the belly of the beast.

We've learned that quiet isn't always peace.

And that norms and notions of what is just isn't always just.

And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it, somehow we do it.

Somehow we've weathered and witnessed a nation that is not broken, but simply unfinished.

We the succesors of a country and a time when a skinny black girl descended from slaves, and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one.

And Yes! We are far from polished,far from pristine, but that doesn't mean we are striving to form a Union that is perfect.

We are striving to forge our Union with purpose. To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors,characters and conditions of man.

And so we lift our gazes not to what stands beween us, but what stands before us .

We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.

We lay down our arms so we can reach out to one another. We seek harm to none, and harmony for all.

Let the globe if nothing else, say this is true: that even as we grieved, we grew; that even as we hurt,we hoped, that even as we tired, we tried, that we'll forgever be tied together, victorious, not because we will never again know defeat, but because we wll never again sow division.

Scripture tells us to envision that "everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid."

If we dare to live up to our own time, then victory won't lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we have made.

That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb, if only we dare it, because being American is more than a pride we inherit--its the past we step into and how we repair it..."

{ 22 year old Amanda is the nation's first youth poet laureate.}