“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free……Send these, the homeless, tempest –tost to me……….I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

When the great and honoured Jewish poet Emma Lazarus wrote these words, later inscribed on a bronze plaque at the base of the Statue of liberty, the doorway to the United States led to a land of glowing vitality, truly a land of gold.

The people who came here had experienced oppression, lack of personal freedoms, homelessness, poverty and perhaps most importantly, the incentive to dream.

So much was possible in this country. Men who entered with nothing but the clothes on their back became tycoons of industry. Some others were pleased to be making a living. But everyone was delighted to have the freedom so long denied and with it the return of the ability to dream. Remember, dreams are only possible when reality is not a nightmare.

We must never go back to living a nightmare. We must never go back to the conditions from which our ancestors escaped and we must fight endlessly to prevent those who are in power from taking us back there.

This is not hyperbole, as some may claim, because we are always being threatened. Freedom is friable and so we must handle it with great care.

One of the beauties of the spacious skies which cover America is our justice system and the checks and balances which the founders of this country – in their infinite wisdom – implemented, knowing how power can corrupt, as it is doing right now. Another beauty is our respect for the rights of others and for the value of life. Although governments use statistics to enumerate the death toll of soldiers, soldiers are not statistics – they are someone’s son or brother or spouse – their loss is pain that cannot be evaluated and before we expend one single life we should be damned sure there’s a good reason.

We must insist on the truth. We are not a nation of infantilized adults who will accept that something is being done for our own good and no questions asked. We must question whose good and if we don’t like the answers, we must raise our voices and take to the streets if necessary.

Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” Also words by Emma Lazarus. We don’t need aristocrats and a monarchy and the lands we want to keep are those of natural splendor which were bestowed on us right here in America by a power greater than any men possess.

There are no more golden doors and if we allow this one to close or to become tarnished, there will be no others. We sing of the land of the free and the home of the brave. Let us rail against those who would keep us from being free and let us not give into manufactured fear because in spite of those who have been corrupted by power, we will remain forever a nation of the brave.