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.

The next time someone uses denial of citizenship as a weapon or brandishes the special status conferred upon him by the accident of birth, ask him this: What have you done lately to earn it?

Here's a proposal, offered only partly in jest: no resident of the United States, whether born here or abroad, should get to be a citizen until age 18, at which time each such resident has to take a test.

The Boomers have modeled a set of bad habits, and one grand gesture is not going to unwind all those bad habits.

Love of country cannot be a supersized version of individual narcissism. True love of country-of this country-is love of our children, of a creed that promises them a better life before it promises us anything, and embraces the sacrifices needed to make that better life. True love of country is giving ourselves to a cause and a purpose larger than ourselves. And that cause is to make liberty worth having, to make the pursuit of happiness deeper than the quest for personal pleasure, and to leave a legacy of progress and possibility.

You want to defend citizenship? Don't persecute or isolate those without papers. Just live like a citizen. That'd be a first-class way to be American.

The boomers will eventually have to accept that it is not possible to stay young forever or to stop aging. But it is possible by committing to show up for each others in community after community, to earn a measure of immortality.