Like many of us, I am not always happy about what’s going on in our nation’s capital. But walking out onto the National Mall, bookended by the Capitol building on one side and the Washington Monument on the other, I still felt some good old American pride. Though the one building seems to have devolved into the hub of the partisan divide, the Washington Monument still stands in honor of the man (and the people who stood with him) who was able to unite 13 disparate colonies into a united front and later into the United States of America. For that effort, and for that sentiment, my heart stirs patriotic.