One day Aunt Maggie Pye asked me what I thought America is. I told her I'd think it over and a few days later I wrote her what appears below. In her own way, she must have liked it because she's been writing to me ever since. I finally decided to post some of her most recent letters on my web site with titles. She said that would be just dandy.

Dear Aunt Maggie Pye:

America is not primarily a nation but a principle, an idea about humanity and the rights belonging to humanity regardless of whom you are or where you came from.

America is eclectic. Americans have diverse faiths, diverse traditions, and diverse preferences in dress, food, housing … even diverse rituals for birth, marriage, and death. Americans are not one but many.

However Americans share, and must continue to share, the common principals that knowledge is the right of everyone, that tolerance is the foundation of liberty, and that knowledge plus liberty yield democracy, prosperity and peace, as well as happiness and fulfillment for the individual.

Americans will continue to be an example for the world so long as they distain obedience to dogma or restrictive beliefs, and embrace diversity in the confidence that an enlightened and liberated diversity can lead humanity to still greater achievements.

In the technologically dangerous Twenty-First Century, the main hope for mankind is that these principles shall enduringly guide Americans and become confirmed around the Globe.
 

Your Nephew
December 24, 1999

The painting is by my Aunt Ann Hurley, now in her upper 80's, of her and my father's home in Easton, NY built by their Swedish parents who came over by boat around 1900. Mom's Quaker ancestors came over by boat from England in the early 1700's, becoming whalers in Rhode Island and finally settling a town along the Hudson River named after her family, Clark's Mills.