I Hear America Singing

For all its flaws, the U.S. is still a hopeful destination for millions.

The Freedom Tower in Lower Manhattan (iStock, Dan Pratt)

By Michael Judge

NEW YORK—I’d been avoiding Lower Manhattan and the site where the World Trade Center’s twin towers once soared for nearly 18 years. Since moving away in 2005, I’d made a point of not visiting what we used to call “ground zero” then later “the pit” where now stands the glistening Freedom Tower twisting into the sky like a giant, mirror-plated drill bit.

The Freedom Tower is the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. It’s also a giant middle finger to those who murdered 2,750 men, women and children in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001. Everything about the Freedom Tower, forever turning toward the sky, says America. At 1,776 feet, its height is an homage to the year the Declaration of Independence was signed.

Talking with my son that overcast January morning, near the New York Harbor, not far from Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty beckoning the world’s “tired” and “poor,” its “huddled masses yearning to bre…