Probably when we threw off the chains of royal oppression across the sea, that we might be ruled by...
Our own locally-grown white male Protestant middle-aged landed gentry?
Probably when we pulled together as a country regardless of class race and gender to defeat the Nazis...
While throwing our own Japanese into prison camps and, afterwards, trying our damnedest to put women's and minority rights back into the Pandora's Box from whence they came?
Probably when we stood as one, in the face of the 9-11 tragedy...
And went shopping for bumper magnets while drone planes killed hoardes of dusky civilians that had nothing to do with it?
Yikes. The Money Spider and myself totally agreeing, if for different reasons perhaps.
EDIT:
Christ, that was horribly fuck*ng glib.
I think what I would mean to say is that... America's soul is in looking forward, not looking inward.
Our nation has been the least-bad in a world of horrible places not because we have had some kind of internal perfection but because we, much of the time anyway when the priests and the moneychangers did not rule so very much, kept striving forward toward the good and the better, kept trying to be better to each other.
Our soul is on the receding horizon of our understanding of how humans are supposed to treat each other and the pursuit of that ever distant goal.
Or at least it was. Fuck, I don't know.
If we're pretending to take people like Sarah Palin seriously, maybe we're lost.