ABRUPTO

10:36 (JPP)

EARLY MORNING BLOGS

2227

"Who do we Americans think we are? This is a cultural question, and it is worth asking: many of the great issues in American public life are ultimately cultural issues. The relation of the well-off to the poor; the meaning and the future of race and ethnicity; the degree to and manner in which we share responsibility for the aged, the sick, the needy; even our mission and place among the world's nations: all these depend on our sense of ourselves as a people -- that is, as a cultural reality. In other words, these social issues depend on how we remember ourselves. "

(Robert Pinsky, "poet laureate of the United States.")