Take care, these Italians, full of failings, are neither you, nor me; they are your neighbors, the ones you meet on the staircase and whom you do not like to greet.
The way America sees Mexico, if they have any sense of it, is like Taco Bell. Our countries are neighbors, and the only hard food to get in America is true Mexican. It's impossible to find, even in L.A. Why is that?
None of my neighbors believe in what I say. They refuse to wear the rings. They will never accept my invention until the day they die. That's what I call the real antichrists.
Too many companies are reluctant to share technical information about threats with each other, and most open platforms and tools don't see widespread adoption. As a result, lots of us are reinventing the wheel and solving the same problems without realizing that our neighbors have already built great solutions.
To our American neighbors, we were model immigrants, a poster family. They told us so. My father had a law degree, my mother was on her way to becoming a doctor, and my siblings and I got good grades and always said 'please' and 'thank you.'
In southern and central Africa, tragedy roared at us, and we roared back. We shared dramas publicly, bled them on the corridors of hospitals, laid our corpses on the beds of neighbors, held our sorrows up in full light. We were volume ten about our madness and disorder, even if we were also resilient and enduring and tough.
Our children need to remember to love each other, how to honor each other, their parents, God, and their neighbors.
To me, a public servant should have both the grounding and the compassion to carry the common sense and good will of his or her neighbors into the political arena.
As elected officials, we were sent to the halls of government by our neighbors to do their work - and much work needs to be done. Remembering our shared experiences with the people we represent makes us better and more accountable civil servants.
For my family and my neighbors, America stood for something real, something tangible. America, and therefore Americans, stood for freedom, family, truth and justice.
