Don&8217;t Pick On Immigrants: Re-Americanize Everyone | TIME.com # Don&8217;t Pick On Immigrants: Re-Americanize Everyone # More than ever today, we need to re-Americanize Americans. We need a movement – for native-born citizens and newcomers alike; adults as much as children – to reanimate our creed, cultivate character # Creed. To be Americanized is first to be immersed in the tenets of our democratic faith, expressed in seminal texts, speeches, and stories, from Jefferson’s time to our own. It # religion and our very imperfect union? Certainly. But our country is unique in that it measures its worth by naming, and ever narrowing, that gap. To Americanize means to build a culture of song, story, and scene around this fact. The patriotic pageants of yore didn’t acknowledge the creative tension between # In the end, a new Americanization movement can’t just be about listing our privileges and immunities, which we catalog in our laws. It also has to be about reinforcing our duties, # which we convey in our habits. Of course, Americanization can be abused and co-opted by those with a narrow, even racist idea of America. That’s what happened a century ago during the last push to Americanize #