People,

Every once in a while - despite all the horribly bad things happening in our world right now, despite the incredibly inept leadership of our country, despite the hatred and fear we've all been led into feeling, despite all of this - every once in a while you have to look out at the place we're fortunate enough to live and say "God damn, I love that red white and blue!"

For me it happened on the 4th. I was riding the bike back up from the cape and emerged from the Callahan Tunnel onto the Zakim Bridge. As I looked around I couldn't get over the engineering accomplishment the bridge is. It really is a beautiful thing, a mass of millions of pounds of steel and concrete that people built with their own hands, put together their own ingenuity and good old American know-how. And perched on one of the towers was a huge American flag waving in the breeze. I know it's corny as all hell but I was pretty overcome. It was nice to feel a surge of patriotism without it being derided by those who would have you believe you can't love America without loving war as well as by those who would have you believe that you have to hate everything about this country if you hate its policies.

Anyway, about halfway across the brige I just started shouting "I love America!!!" And people, if you can't love a place where you can be a happy, severely broke musician riding a motorcycle across a giant bridge on a beautiful day then I think there is something very wrong with you.

Kerry and Edwards 2004.