#erica

We must shift the energy policy debate in America with an increased focus on alternative and renewable fuels and Congress must pass meaningful alternative fuels and incentive programs to help move the U.S. away from dependence on foreign oil. ↗

— Rick Renzi

#america #away #congress #debate #dependence

Of course one’s sense of identification with the nation is inflected by all kinds of particulars, including one’s class, race, gender, and sexual identification. … But [regarding] national character …, aside from references to a national aesthetic — literary, musical, and choreographic, there are two poles I reference: minimalist and maximalist. I love them both — the cryptic poems of Emily Dickinson folded up in tiny packets and hidden away in a box, the sparse, understated choreographies of Merce; but also the “trashy, profane and obscene” poems of Whitman and Ginsberg, [and] Martha Graham’s expressionism. I am, myself, a minimalist. But I love distortion guitar and the wild exhibitionism of so many American artists. Also, these divisions are false. Emily Dickinson, in fact, can be as trashy and obscene as the best of them! Anyway, Dickinson and Whitman are at the heart of this narrative. They are the Dancing Queen and the Guitar Hero. ↗

— Barbara Browning

#i-m-trying-to-reach-you #maximalism #minimalism #love

Josh: So, Toby, it’s election night. What do you say about a country that goes out of its way to protect even those citizens that try to destroy it? Toby: God bless America. ↗

— Aaron Sorkin

#democracy #freedom #west-wing #freedom

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you. ↗

— Walt Whitman

#song

I know there was a time, when our country was new, when the assignment of these numbers helped organize something that was on the brink of not existing. But we are no longer that country. We are so much more now. ↗

— Kiera Cass

#change #kiera-cass #the-elite #the-selection #change

All of us, poor & rich alike, have been conditioned by our upbringings. Impoverished men & women may become lulled into a state of "learned helplessness" without hope to change their lives. Likewise, the wealthy can walk in a state of "learned blindness" ignoring the desperation of the local & global poor. ↗

— John Green

#homeless-in-america #change

In the old Republican days the subject of slavery and of the saving of the Union made appeals to the consciences and liberty-loving instincts of the people. These later years have been full of talk about commerce and dinner pails, but I feel sure that the American conscience and the American love of liberty have not been smothered. They will break through this crust of sordidness and realize that those only keep their liberties who accord liberty to others. ↗

— Benjamin Harrison

#justice #liberty #love

Stop listening to the TV tell you about America the beautiful . . . get up and be America the beautiful. ↗

— Rivera Sun

#america #beauty #change #hope #inspirational

I couldn’t figure out if it was fate or faith that had brought me there. How funny those two words sounded when paired together. One was the inevitable, something I could not change in my life, while the other was the hope and belief that I could. These two words were enemies of each other, and one of them was down right dangerous for a slave to have anywhere near his mind. ↗

— Jay Grewal

#black-history #civil-war #equality #slavery #change

…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America? ↗

— John Updike

#angstrom #inspirational #isolation #loneliness #outside