Thoughts on "A Bold Step Back"

I saw a tweet from gregadams about A Bold Step Back. Everyone seems to be throwing things at the wall to see what will stick. It's great!

Here's the expurgated problem statement (it's a bit windy):

The right has lost focus, we are spending too much, we are taxing too much, we are growing the government too much and we are pandering to the special interests rather than to the people. Our representatives have only one goal once they win an election: to win the next one as well.

We have moved from electing statesmen to electing politicians. From having representatives serving us to those ruling us. It gets rather difficult to tell the two sides apart on many issues.

...

The Republican party has such a stigma to it now that it will be very difficult to recover and get back on track.

And here's the even more heavily redacted solution statement with my comments interwoven:

We rebrand the party. we CANNOT start a 3rd party, as it will only further doom us, and splinter the right. Rebranding is the right move...

I agree that a third party is not viable. But rebranding is going to be hard to do. There are a lot of loyal Republicans who think they are being well served by the party at the state and local level. You don't hear from them because that wheel isn't squeaky. So, I fear that a rebranding effort will go down a lot like a 3rd party.

The geographies where the conservative movement is likely to grow are urban and suburban. These are the Republican's squeakiest wheels. This is where the brand is most damaged. And these areas also tend to be socially liberal. Is it possible to forge an explicit alliance with the Libertarians that would have Republicans support Libertarian candidates in urban areas and Libertarians support Republican candidates that stand for statewide or, in some cases, congressional district-wide, elections?

On April 7th, Saint Louis held an election in which no Republican even filed to run for the office of Mayor. There were four names on the ballot and one was a Libertarian, Robb Cunningham. An alliance between Republicans and Libertarians would not have put Cunningham over the top, but it would give urban Republicans a reason to goto the polls. I suspect many who did go that day simply threw their support to the anti-Slay, Maida Coleman (I), who got a respectable 34% of the vote.

...we find people that understand that they are going in to make a very real difference, some very difficult choices, and DO WHAT IS RIGHT. They will also know that there is a very good possibility that they will not get reelected.

But while there, they will fight hard for our agenda, and NOT COMPROMISE at all.. They will continually submit and fight for legislation to roll back the size of government, CONGRESSIONAL PAY voting to bring their pay inline with those that they represent. Serving should be an honor, not a 'get rich quick' scheme. They will dismantle the Congressional benefits gravy train, scaling back their health care to the same system that Postal Workers get.

Sounds good. Here's a suggestion for conservative (Republican/Libertarian) candidates running for office in urban districts in 2010: promise to take a salary equal to the median salary in your district plus travel expenses.

Term limits 2 terms max at any level, and while your time goes toward govt. retirement, no one collects a dollar in retirement for less than 20 years service. Just like the people that you serve.

The abomination called TARP is why I started blogging last fall and term limits were my first topic. Here are my two points: 1) legislators should not be allowed to serve consecutive terms and 2) use state constitutional amendments to limit the terms of a state's congressional delegation. The idea behind #1 is that our congresscritters need to re-acquaint themselves with their constituents more often, get a real (non-govt) job once in awhile, and never raise money or campaign while on our dime. The elegance of #2 is that state legislators would be creating job openings for themselves in their congressional delegation. State assembles have a vested interest in this. Read my first post!

We will remove thousands of laws from the books, we have so many laws that it is virtually impossible to not break them.

I've been meaning to blog about this for awhile. Whoever the next conservative presidential candidate is, I want them to promise not to add a single new law until every existing law has been reviewed and re-written. At the very least, each re-written law should include a measure of effectiveness test (or tests) which, if not met, sunsets the law. A similar approach should be applied to bureaucratic regulations. Simply put, if the law doesn't do what was promised, what the law's sunset test guarantees, then it should go away.

Here's a nice video about some ineffective laws we have:

Massive Campaign reform. No Lobbiest or corporate money. you represent THE PEOPLE, not COMPANIES !!!

I think my term limit proposal goes a long way to addressing this. Some other thoughts... You can only give money to candidates for whom you are able to vote in the upcoming election. That essentially shuts down corporate donations and cross-country meddling. Companies need a voice in government so that regulation may be informed by experience; therefore, I'm not completely on board with the "no lobbiest" rule.

REAL Transparancy... Bills get posted online so that THE PEOPLE can tell you what they want...

Sounds good.

• Stop same day registration and voting voting. Eliminate fraud by requiring ID and fingerprint on ballot.
• Stop paying Taxpayer $$ to fund 'the arts' unless it's in the School syatem
• Stop funding NPR if people want to hear a radio/TV station, they will watch, sell ads like everyone else/
• Stop requiring that you must be in a union to work on a govt. project.

Good luck goring those sacred cows! I'm with ya, but we're tilting at windmills here.

• Let the states decide issues regarding Abortion / Gay Marraige etc, the Federal government aneed not meddle here

I have no ideas on how to do this, but we need a way to throw things to the Laboratory of Democracy—the states. Abortion and gay marriage are two such issues. I don't think we want to force a decision by compelling the states to vote on contentious issues in a set time frame, just take the issue off of the national stage and let the Laboratory do its thing.

My First Gig as a Reporter (pt4)

100 Days Coverage

Bill Hennessy and GatewayPundit are organizing a Tea Party near the site of Obama's teleprompter reading to commemorate his first hundred days in office, Fox High School in Arnold. I'm planning to be there. With luck, I'll get a picture of the voice talent... maybe even TOTUS himself. The crumb crunchers will be with me. I'll be the guy with the video camera wearing a four month old accompanied by the babe's Gadsden flag wielding sister (assuming the girls do not thwart my efforts).

If you went to one of the outlying Tax Day Tea Parties (Cape Girardeau, Sikeston, Lee’s Summit, etc.), I want to talk with you. If you helped lead one of those tea parties, I *really* want to talk with you. I know it's hard to have your voice heard and I want to help as much as I can. Email me: dsm012 -at- gmail -d0t- com

If you're with a broadcaster and would like to use my footage, please email me (dsm012 -at- gmail -d0t- com). You will need to 1) create an account with Motionbox.com and 2) add me as a contact. I will need to add you as a Motionbox.com contact, so I will need your email address—presumably the one you used to contact me. Here's a rough sketch of my plans for Wednesday. Please make suggestions in the comments!

1. Conduct interviews and gather other footage (9AM to noon-ish Central Time)
2. RIP the tape (hopefully done by 2PM)
3. Create low-res version for logging and upload to YouTube (3-ish)
4. Email broadcasters (4PM)
5. Create hi-res version of what I think is the best material and upload to Motionbox.com (my goal is to keep this under 500M... probably not available until Thursday morning... bandwidth is still a problem)
6. Go out to dinner to celebrate nine years of marital bliss
   
7. Email broadcasters (TBD)

If there are specific cuts from the low-res version you want, then email me and I'll do what I can to get them on Motionbox.com for you. Recognize that until I have a real bandwidth solution, fast turn around will be hard. Oh, and I've got two girls to look after as part of my stay-at-home dad duties.

Business Opportunities

For part four of this series, I was planning to review some business opportunities I thought of during my adventures. It's getting late, so I'm just going to cover one of them: moving hi-res video.

I found a new enthusiasm for video after getting involved in the Tea Party movement, so I ripped all of my 1080i tapes to disk (including an air show with about fifteen minutes of the Blue Angels). Each is about an hour long and occupies from 10 to 14 gigabytes. It took me about 15 hours to upload 2G over my DSL connection, so that's a non-starter.

What I would really like is a Motionbox.com kiosk: I give them an HD tape or an external hard drive and they put the goods in my account. This model is very similar to one that already exists. If you want to get a print of one of your digital pictures, you can go to a CVS or Target or where ever, put your flash drive in one of their kiosks, and walk out of the store with your prints fifteen minutes later.

Retail stores do not have the kind of bandwidth I need, so they're not (yet) an option and probably never will be. I thought FedEx/Kinkos might be, so I asked at my local one and they told me that they didn't have great bandwidth. This seems like an obvious growth opportunity for them, but they will probably want to continue to sneaker-net my content to PJTV.

I want the kind of bandwidth computer datacenters have. I haven't contacted any yet. I doubt that they would sell bandwidth like that, but who knows. If you can think of other solutions to this problem, please mention them in the comments!

I could upgrade my DSL. While Charter's Ultra60 looks awesome, they're in bankruptcy proceedings. An incremental improvement to my DSL would help, but it wont be enough.

I have no idea when my posts about being a reporter will end... there will be several more as time permits.

Related Posts:

• My First Gig as a Reporter (pt3)
  
• My First Gig as a Reporter (pt2)
  
• My First Gig as a Reporter (pt1)
  
• Finally!
  
• Estimating the Crowd at Kiener Plaza
  
• Video Setup for Hennessy Interview
  
• Bill Hennessy Interview

My First Gig as a Reporter (pt3)

This is my third "lessons learned" post about covering the Saint Louis Tax Day Tea Party as a PJTV Citizen Reporter. My first post focused on my audio reporting. The second discusses my video work with an emphasis on the expectations of content creators and broadcasters and the architecture of a distribution model. This post will extend my thoughts about web based edit decision lists (EDLs)... As commenter JayDee pointed out on my second post, what I'm really talking about is a combination of video logging (not vlogging) and EDLs.

I'd like to see Motionbox.com or a similar site provide tools for annotating video. What I'm looking for is a way to markup source video so that it can be easily found. Not just found in the sense of going to the three minutes you want to see in a one hour piece. I mean found in the sense that you googled "Saint Louis Tea Party crowd size" and get links to Dana Loesch's thirty second bit as well as Bill Hennessy's comments at the event. I used Dana's remarks in this one minute spot:



Could the Google results look something like the image below? This is sort of like the Bloggingheads.tv links I discussed in pt2; however, unlike Bloggingheads.tv there are two highlighted clips. I'd want controls to play the segments, change the in-out times, give a star rating to the content, add or change an annotation, and remix the clip.
The image above is a modified version of Motionbox.com's trim interface. In other words, they already have a tool for doing basic edits. I've used it a little. It's good for what it does. Now lets see a web-based video logging tool. Public annotations will be indexed by Google and other search engines bringing source video, in its original context, to their search results.

There will be a part 4. Look for it Monday or Tuesday.

Related Posts:

• My First Gig as a Reporter (pt2)
  
• My First Gig as a Reporter (pt1)
  
• Finally!
  
• Estimating the Crowd at Kiener Plaza
  
• Video Setup for Hennessy Interview
  
• Bill Hennessy Interview

My First Gig as a Reporter (pt2)

This is my second "lessons learned" post about covering the Tax Day Tea Party here in Saint Louis as a PJTV Citizen Reporter. My first post focused on my audio reporting. This post will review my video work.

The seven part YouTube playlist at the top of this post is the whole enchilada. Mostly. All the copyrighted material (music) has been cut from the beginning and I dropped about 15 seconds of Dana (between parts 6 and 7) to avoid having an eight part playlist. Sorry Dana! Note to self, plan your edits better so you don't have to do that in the future.

Interview

I only did one video interview at the tea party and it came after the event when I spoke with Rich from Circle of Concern. Circle of Concern is a local food bank. They provided a van to pickup donations of non-perishables. Operation Food Search also participated in the tea party food drive. They had a 26' to 28' foot truck, like the big ones UHaul has.



I don't think I did very well. My questions were sorta ok, but there are three points in the clip where I just can't remember the name of "Operation Food Search". The audio's not very good. I'm too loud and you can barely hear Rich. Perhaps I should've used my MP3 recorder to get a better recording of Rich and then edited the two together. A microphone is probably a better option since I could point that at whoever is currently speaking. The video is blurry, in part, because of the hardware I used. I plan to use a better camera in the future, but that will mean that I'm recording to tape. I hate tape...

Quality

It's my experience that conservative voices don't get much airtime. Grainy videos with bad audio are not going to change that. If you're seriously pursuing citizen journalism, then quality has to be a priority. This not only includes quality content (e.g.: an engaging and informative interview, a newsworthy event), but it also includes technical quality (e.g.: 1080i or 1080p video, crisp focus, stereo sound, good levels, etc.)

TV newsrooms across the country have made huge investments so that they can broadcast in high-def. They don't want bouncy cell phone footage except when there's no alternative. They want high quality content: an engaging and informative subject, a sharp picture, and clear audio.

Content is still king. With the economic downturn and the pressures imposed on broadcast news by their competition on radio and the Internet, newsrooms are going to be looking for less expensive sources for their footage. They're going to be looking for open content. Content they can use at little or no cost. Content that you gather with your HD video camera and then make available to them on the Internet.

Open Video Content

Here are my first thoughts on a concise list of parameters that content creators (citizen journalists) are agreeing to when they offer their work as open content:

1. The content creator must be credited by the content user (TV station, website, etc.)
   
2. A link to the complete source material must be provided in the show notes on the content user's website
3. The content user may edit the content as long as the meaning is not inverted
   

Obviously, these are my priorities. Editing a video will cause some distortions, if only by omission. The link back to the original should mitigate minor distortions. #3 seems reasonable, but I'm not sure how to put teeth in it. Should a lawyer draft a simple open content license? Perhaps the Creative Commons License would suffice... Please put your thoughts in a comment below!

Video Distribution

Source audio and video content is only the beginning. After the video is shot, it has to be made available online. YouTube is one option, but it has significant drawbacks. Video uploads to YouTube must not exceed 1G and they cannot be longer than 10 minutes. Those factors limit quality and increase the workload for providing video content online.

For the Saint Louis Tax Day Tea Party, I took the time to enter the metadata for each part of my seven part video. That metadata includes name, description, tags, location, etc. Copy and paste helps a lot, but it's still a pain. Motionbox.com offers a much better solution. Since you are not limited either by duration or file size, there's less administrative overhead because you don't have to dice-up your video and duct-tape it back together with a YouTube "playlist".

Before I figured out Motionbox.com, I exchanged emails with some folks at PJTV. They were helpful, but they really couldn't fix the bottleneck: I did not have enough bandwidth. I discovered this problem before tax day when I tried to upload my interview with Bill Hennessy. It took 12 to 15 hours to upload that interview to PJTV. That's just too long to be useful and it invites data corruption problems and other weirdness.

Motionbox.com has a tool that manages the upload process. Even though the upload takes just as long, their upload app tool allows you to queue multiple videos. You can also pause all uploads with the app. The pause feature is very helpful when your wife starts complaining that the Internet is slow.

I still don't know if PJTV used any of my footage. I know some of it uploaded successfully. I know that they received a DVD via FedEx Tuesday (4/21) with all of it. This is another reason for #1 and #2 in my list of open content expectations—I'd have a way to find out what they used. Of course, by Tuesday my video footage was, to put it charitably, starting to ripen. News is time critical.

Crowdsourcing the coverage of an event that has over 500 locations on a single day was bound to be messy. If there were other videographers that weren't able to get their content uploaded, I would not be surprised. My conclusion here is that the videographer needs to be responsible for getting their video online. I think that's the view PJTV took. I also think videographers should be independent. It doesn't matter to me who broadcasts my work; I just want it broadcast. If PJTV or someone else, is willing to guarantee that X minutes of my footage will be broadcast or that they're willing to pay me, then that's another story.

If content creators are independent and responsible for getting their footage online, then Motionbox.com is the linchpin. It took awhile for me to upload my recording of the tea party to Motionbox.com. The video was online for a couple of days when it was shutdown for bandwidth/cost. That's not a slight on Motionbox.com. I love their service! Their prompt and helpful email support was excellent. They offered me the option of keeping the video live by upgrading my account from Premium to Pro, but I was concerned about cost. Their Pro accounts are charged per gigabyte for bandwidth (at a competitive rate)... here's the thing, I couldn't figure out how, in two days, a video of the St Louis Tax Day Tea Party had been viewed 600+ times. Paying for each of those was a scary prospect.

With a Premium account on Motionbox.com there's a limit to the number of views/downloads your videos can have. There's no limit to the quality, file size, or duration, so Motionbox.com is a nexus between content creators and broadcasters. I grant access to my video content to PJTV, C-SPAN, NPR, Fox, whoever and they download the original hi-def content for broadcast.

What would happen if PJTV (or any outfit, really) had video content from hudreds of locations? If those are live feeds, it's going to be a brutal day herding cats. If it's recorded video like mine, then video editors are going to be working day and night reviewing the content. They might just pitch some of the video, but then they're alienating the people that shot that video for them. The most labor intensive component of video editing is annotating the video, marking the start and end points of various segments, and identifying who or what is on the reel.

Edit Decision List (EDL)

The annotations of a source video are often in edit decision list format or EDL. EDL was originally developed to keep track of all of the edits on multiple source video tapes so that they could be assembled into a movie or show. It's the lingua franca of video editing. It can be the basis of a library of metadata that allows a video editor to quickly find the clip they need.

If you still don't get what EDL is, here's an edit from a recent Bloggingheads.tv diavlog between Peter Singer and Tyler Cowen. The edit link captures the "in" (start time) of 48:41 and "out" (end time) of 51:04. You need me to annotate it by telling you that Tyler asks Peter whether it's moral to eat fish and I'd give the clip four out of five stars.

Bloggingheads.tv has already implemented part of the annotation process: defining the in-out points. Now we need someone to incorporate the other metadata: who, what, where, why, and how good is the clip. The nice thing about that work is that it scales—you can crowdsource it. Here's how that might have been done for the Saint Louis Tax Day Tea Party:

1. Bill Hennessy announces a phone number and asks for volunteers to text it from their phones
   
2. People who texted the number are sent a weblink to access the next day from home
   
3. When they follow the link, they're given a ten minute block of the footage to review
4. They enter in-out points, annotations, and star ratings for the edits in their ten minutes
   

"Whoa!" you think. "You'll get tons of hits on that Motionbox.com account and go over your limit." Yes. If the link is to Motionbox.com, but if the source is diced into ten minute blocks and put on YouTube, then there isn't a problem. YouTube versions are used for review and Motionbox.com is used for the hi-def version. Ideally, I'd like to see Motionbox.com offer some sort of journalism package. I'd want a way for people to annotate the video content. To reduce bandwidth costs, they could provide a low resolution version of the video for annotation.

I think I'll do a third lessons learned post... This doesn't feel done, but I need some sleep.

Related Posts:

• My First Gig as a Reporter (pt1)
  
• Finally!
  
• Estimating the Crowd at Kiener Plaza
  
• Video Setup for Hennessy Interview
  
• Bill Hennessy Interview

Update: Thanks for the Instalanche, Glenn! Part 3 will be up some time Sunday so please check back.

Video Odyssey

I had this brilliant idea. After watching people with Flip video cameras and cell phones trying to conduct an interview, I realized that there had to be a better way. A tripod mounted camera pointed at the interviewee felt more like an interrogation, to my mind, so I kept thinking about ways to mount two cameras on a tripod.

In hindsight, I don't know why I limited myself to a single tripod. Perhaps it was because I only had one. Regardless, as I thought about ways to mount two small video cameras on one tripod, I remembered my friend L. One of his hobbies is stereo photography. I sent him an email and he said he had what I was looking for and I could borrow it for a little while. It's a custom piece of machined aluminum about a foot long with mount points for two cameras (see picture above).

There are a couple of other hurdles that I had to address. First, what to do if I'm interviewing someone taller than myself (like my PJTV Citizen Reporter interview of Bill Hennessy)? And how do you keep you and your interviewee in the video frame? The simple solution to both of these problems is to sit down for the interview. That worked well for Bill and I. Still, if you're conducting standing interviews, I'd strongly recommend using two tripods to address the first problem, though even that may not work since many tripods are only 5' to 5' 6" tall. For the second problem, I'd get a couple of interlocking foam mats—one for the interviewer and one for the interviewee. Just having a place to stand should do the trick.

I think this is a pretty good hardware setup for conducting interviews. I'm not sure if it will catch on, but one place it might is Bloggingheads.tv. There's something about the cybernetic headgear commonly seen on Bloggingheads.tv that I find distracting, but I think the bigger gain would be the face-to-face exchange that this sort of setup facilitates. I recognize that in many cases, Bloggingheads.tv interviews are conducted over large distances. Also, there may be technical reasons for their setup.

Before I talk about the nightmare that video editting can be, I'll mention that you should check your video camera's focal distance. That's the distance at which your camera is in focus. I had not paid attention to this detail and, at 2m (6.5') my cameras are dismal in this regard. Keep in mind, you want to be relatively close to the camera for good audio recording, so I'd look for something at or under 1m. If I were looking to buy, I'd go with the Flip Ultra.

Video editing is still a mystery to me. I've dabbled in it for about fifteen years and I'm always surprised at what a frustrating time sync it is. Once I had recorded my interview with Bill, the process forward seemed simple. Take the two source videos, line 'em up based on the audio, and then dissolve back and forth depending on who's speaking. This is about as simple as video editing gets.

I don't know how many times I rendered/exported the movie from Adobe Premiere. I certainly don't understand why it took two input sources of about 0.5G and created output anywhere from 2.5G to 6G. The 16 minutes of black screen with audio that weighed in at 3.5G... what in the world? How did I solve the black screen and the still image video problems? Simple, I stopped using my Vista box and went to my XP machine. Unfortunately, that did not help with the size of the rendered movies.

The size problem was largely solved with ArcSoft's MediaConverter. Once I got my final render out of Premiere (weighing in at 2.5G), I put it through MediaConverter and got a 70M version. That's the one I put on Facebook, but at 16 minutes it was over YouTube's 10 minute limit. I used Windows Movie Maker to split it into the two parts that are now on YouTube (pt1 and pt2). Splitting the video definitely reduced the quality.

American Awakening

A common refrain earlier this political season was: "there's more that unites us than divides us." We are all Americans, after all. We must focus on that which unites us for the civility of our public lives. We must set aside our skin color, though we are still proud of our heritage. We must set aside our religion, though it is still paramount to each of us. We must unite as the American race.

"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
— Statue of Liberty National Monument, The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus

Such were and will be the ancestors of the American race because we are a race defined by our love of liberty and united by our differences. Out of many different ingredients, we have created one American race in our great melting pot. This race is defined by an ideal that transcends time and place, a dream of freedom, a dream of unity for which we all strive.

We know of the slave's dreams of freedom and equality. We know of the African-American's dreams of liberty and justice. Americans have heard of these dreams deferred. We see how beautiful our black siblings are and we are ashamed of our wrongs against them. And in our shame we have fought for those dreams and for our own unity. We fought and died. Through that tumult we were able to advance our American ideal of freedom. But, though we remained one country, our civil fabric was horribly torn.

Dream of the American race transforming the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood! Hold fast that dream within your heart! That dream brought countless Americans to Washington DC on an August day in '63. America responded with the Civil Rights Act of '64 and other incremental steps toward our American ideal: Loving v. Virginia effectively legalized interracial marriage, Jim Crow laws were repealed, and affirmative action policies implemented to name a few.

As Americans we are dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal. Again and again our tweaks begin to approximate equality and rectify passed wrongs. Our instruments of change are not perfectly tuned. We see the over correction in affirmative action when one American is granted a job and a "more qualified" American is denied that job. Affirmative action is a blunt instrument that can mar our civil fabric. If affirmative action works it will someday no longer be required and if it does not work, then all it does is foster racial strife. We can do better. We must.

To end affirmative action by legislative decree would be far too jarring, rending the civil fabric. Yet, America’s first woman Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, captured the feelings of many Americans when she remarked that the Court “had tried to be careful in stressing that affirmative action should be a temporary bandage rather than a permanent cure.” We need a mechanism to allow affirmative action to fade away while it continues to right past wrongs for a time. This is our dream of a future free from shame and bright beyond the telling of it.

There is a mechanism to gradually bring about that future—an American approach that is a novel appeal to individual liberty. When presented with a job application or when applying to college, indicate that your race is only American. In so doing, you opt out of affirmative action. Some Americans will do this and some Americans will not. In time, as we realize our dream of unity and mend the fabric of our civility, more Americans will do this than will not. In time, affirmative action will pass away by our collective resolve to be American.

Americans are foremost in the fight of the battles of the free because we dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. Our common American heritage is what unites us, but we lack an analytic tool, a metric, that would allow us to asses our unity. We do not know when one American has slighted another. We only learn of injustice and resentment when it boils over in violence described in the news. Oh, then we know the civil fabric was torn. We must know ourselves better. We must look into our soul.

We must be introspective. The American centre can be the cap stone that prevents things falling apart. When you complete the census form in 2010 and when pollsters enquire about your race, indicate that you are American. If permitted and so inclined affirm your other racial identities. Claiming to be part of the American race demonstrates your solidarity with other Americans. Choosing not to identify as American communicates that we are not collectively living up to the American ideal. You are rendering a judgment on the sins of other Americans when you do not self-identify as American and in so doing you anonymously challenge us to work harder toward the American ideal. Both are required, both patriotic.

It is the contrast of these choices that creates our introspection. The mere act of self-identifying as American does little, though we hope and pray that it may mildly warm our civil fellowship. Poll after poll, census after census, we will begin to see the places where more Americans self-identify as such and where fewer do. O beautiful American dream that sees beyond the years! We will learn what brings Americans together and what sunders them. We will see hideous racism and glorious integration. And we will know better for we will know ourselves. If America is to become a greater nation, this must become true.

Americans are not constrained to a single race. This is captured in the label African-American. These Americans identify as both fully American and fully African. It is as if two roads diverge--a choice between two races, two identities. But it's a false choice. Americans, African-Americans, gladly choose to travel both and be one traveler. And that makes all the difference. The individual American striving for that ideal of liberty and unity… the American whose heritage includes European, African, Asian, or Native American blood… the American whose ancestors were Hindu, Christian, Islamic, Atheist, or Jewish… these Americans wear the great seal on their hearts: E Pluribus Unum. Out of Many, One. Just as the individual American is One, though of diverse origin, so our body politic is One, though of diverse composition. Let our future radiant shine with sweet hopes American!

There is much change and promise in this American future. Will we rather bear those ills we have, than fly to others we know not of? We will soar on wings like eagles because, united as Americans, our strength will be renewed. The change here proposed is an appeal to all Americans to make a positive difference in a small way. The magnitude of this change is amplified by the tranquil deliberations and voluntary consent of so many distinct communities. Every American is empowered to play a critical part.

The American soul yearns for racial reconciliation. The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty is justly considered, perhaps, as deeply, as finally, staked on this experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people. There is no shortcut. But we will laugh as we go because we will learn that we all have something in common: we are American.