What makes The United States so impressive is that our head of state defends the right to speech with which he disagrees, or at least he is supposed to if he does the only job to which the founders asked him to swear an oath – “to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Perhaps no lyric ever written so succinctly sums up my belief in the idea of America more than these words from that song. Those words cut through me harder than they normally do. We’re losing who we are. The list of things we’ll do is getting longer and the list of things we won’t, shorter. This week, 42 million Americans are facing their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits running dry because of the shutdown.