Fight on State

Raise your hand if you’re proud to be an American. I am. I love this nation and I feel so blessed that, by the grace of God, I was born here. I feel tremendous pride when I see Old Glory waiving in the breeze. I still get a little choked up when I hear Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” This is a great nation. We’ve done—and do—great things. We delivered Europe, twice, from invasion. We put a human on the moon. We rescued Iranian fisherman from their foundering craft in rough seas.

And we’ve done some very wrong things. We embraced slavery for the first century of our existence. We tolerated abject racism long after slavery was abolished. We all but wiped out the indigenous peoples of our land, and largely marginalized those who were left. We rounded up and interned our entire population of Japanese-Americans during World War II. We kept women from voting. We’ve spied on our own people. We’ve trampled our Constitution on several occasions. We still do wrong things today. We will, undoubtedly, do wrong things in the future.

Yet, I am still proud to be an American. Partly because we Americans take responsibility for our mistakes. We have stepped up and owned these shameful eras and ugly episodes. We don’t pretend they didn’t happen. We don’t sugar coat them. We look them in the face, work to rise above them, and endeavor to be an even better nation.

In much the same way, I am proud to be a Nittany Lion. I am thinking fondly of my alma mater on this first day of September, as a new freshman class is just settling in, “shapeless in the hands of fate,” as a new era of Penn State football is about to begin, as a great university looks it failures square in the eye and struggles to right unrightable wrongs as best it can. My heart, broken as it is, is in Happy Valley today.

Fight on State.