Good morning, it's May 24, the Friday before Memorial Day, also the day of the week when I provide quotations meant to be uplifting or educational. Today's words of wisdom comes from a pantheon of American greats – and I found them in an unexpected source – my own passport.
First, a brief back story: In "Faith of My Fathers," the acclaimed 1999 memoir John McCain wrote with Mark Salter, McCain imparted a lesson about patriotism, which he learned while he was a U.S. Navy officer being held in captivity in North Vietnam.
"In prison, I fell in love with my country," he wrote. "I had loved her before then, but like most young people, my affection was little more than a simple appreciation for the comforts and privileges most Americans took for granted. It wasn't until I had lost America for a time that I realized how much I loved her."
It was a sentiment McCain would repeat over the years, including during his acceptance speech at his party's presidential nomination during the 2008 Republican National Convention.
I'm writing this note from friendly Canada, not wartime Vietnam, and from a hotel room, not a prison cell. Still, when you're outside the borders of the United States on a Memorial Day, it gets you to thinking. During an airline delay, I thumbed through my passport and noticed that I haven't been abroad much in recent times. A stamp for the Dominican Republican, to visit kin; another from Ireland where one of my great-grandfathers came from. But even the pages with no visa stamps aren't empty. The State Department, I noticed today, has an inspiring quote on each page. In a moment, I'll mention a couple of them, which remain relevant today.
The first quotation in my 2016 passport comes, fittingly, from George Washington. It is followed by Thomas Jefferson's famous prose in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. Then the choices become more interesting. The next is from Martin Luther King Jr.
"We have a great dream," Rev. King said. "It started way back in 1776, and God grant that America will be true to her dream."
What follows are the words of four U.S. presidents – Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson – and three other inspiring quotations. The last is from Anna Julia Cooper, an American woman born into slavery on Aug. 10, 1858, who lived long enough to see LBJ's presidency.
Three years after the Civil War, at age 9, she went to an Episcopal school founded in Raleigh to educate former slaves. She excelled there, in English literature as well as music, math, and science. She studied the classics – in their original Latin, Greek, and French – and was made a teacher at the school. Later, she earned a doctorate degree at Oberlin College, and emerged as one of the nation's first black feminists. She could teach today's feminists a thing or two. (And also today's progressives, liberals, centrists, and conservatives, for that matter.)
"The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class," Anna Cooper said. "It is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity."
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
