America is a tune. It must be sung together.

Lee’s metaphor treats the nation less as a fixed territory or creed than as a living piece of music: something temporal, patterned, and dependent on performance. A “tune” only becomes real when voiced; likewise, “America” is realized through shared civic action rather than private conviction alone. The insistence that it “must be sung together” stresses cooperation across differences—many voices coordinating on a common line—while also implying discipline (listening, keeping time, harmonizing). The phrase can be read as a rebuke to factionalism and a call to participatory democracy: citizenship is not spectatorship but ensemble work, and the national ideal is sustained only when people actively join in.