I love my country so much but we are lost, and have been for too long. Somewhere along the way we lost the American spirit. We let anger, hate, and blame take over society. In the process, we lost our collective pride in being an American; pride in knowing what all of us can achieve when we truly are the United States of America

As a child, I remember being in school watching the launches from the John F. Kennedy Space Center and marveling at it all. Though I admired the astronauts and their "spaceships", what really captured me was a young boy understanding for the first time what America could achieve with leadership and unity. That's when I first learned President Kennedy's quote about our space program,

"We choose to go to the moon this decade and do the other things, not because it is easy, but because it is hard" (September 12, 1962 — Rice University)

Man I love that quote, to me, it sums up everything it means to be an American — we don't give up because something is hard, we rise to the challenge, we push through, we dare to dream, and "yes, we can" do the impossible

We recently celebrated the 24th anniversary of September 11th. A cowardice act that took 2,977 members of our American family causing imaginable loss for our nation; changing it forever. My own high school class lost two Titans as a result of 9/11. We lost Peter J. O'Neil in the towers that September morning and we lost "Los" Army Sgt. Juan Carlos Baldeosingh on the battlefields of Iraq some years later. All of this has brought back memories of 24 years ago today, September 12, 2001 and the following days and months of that year. We didn't let anger, hate, and blame take over society. We were filled with the American spirit and truly displayed the power of the collective. One night from that autumn stands out more than most

It was Game 3 of the World Series — the fall classic, and President Bush was there to throw out the first pitch. At that moment in the shadows of ground zero, with our president standing tall in the center of it all, we weren't a liberal America and conservative America, we were the UNITED States of America. When Yankee stadium erupted into chants of USA, it roared like a "spaceship" going to the moon letting the world know we weren't defeated, we were UNITED. I miss that America. That's an America worth working towards again

At this defining moment in history, we have the opportunity to recapture the American spirit. Only this time let our glory not be fleeting. Let's finally work together to form that more perfect union as our founders challenged us to do. Living each day by the American motto

E pluribus unum. Out of many, one