Happy 250th (July 4th, 2026)

I love the United States. I always have and I always will. I come from a family that has shown me unconditional love, and so that is what I know to give back. But I fear that not everyone who claims to love the USA feels this way. There are people who will love this country so long as it feeds their selfish desires, but turn their backs on it as soon as it starts working toward a common good, and then they will find another place to “love” and take advantage of. There are others who “love” this country only when their preferred candidate or party is in power. 

I love this country with full awareness of its imperfections. The founding fathers developed this country with full awareness of their imperfections, and of the imperfections of the nation they were creating. History looks back on many of their characteristics with criticism, rightfully so, as they were ashamed of certain aspects of themselves. Yet, with a humility that is lacking in much of our leadership today, they were willing to make a best effort in creating a new government and country that was free from monarchic rule. Within their efforts to create a government and compromise across ideological divides of the time to unite a large geographical region of otherwise separate colonies, they left future generations the tools to modify the government so it could adapt to new circumstances in the world within and around it, as well as correct the mistakes its original architects made. Let us not forget that it was not a smooth process. What we celebrate today as the 250th birthday of a nation was not when we won the Revolutionary War, but was when broad enough consensus was built around what we were fighting for. That consensus was then fought for routinely for years before we had a united national government.

I also love this country for its beauty. Having traveled a fair bit around this country, the natural beauty of this land is awe inspiring. From its greatest wonders to the rolling plains to its beaches on the coasts, the USA is outrageously beautiful. There is no doubt that I love it. I have dedicated my work to trying to improve it because I love it so much that I believe it has much more in it than we currently experience, and I want to support it in reaching its full potential.

This is what I know true love to be. When I was in college, especially in the aftermath of a particular traumatic experience, I got into some bad habits. My biggest vice was smoking pot. The more I smoked, the more other bad habits compounded, from not studying or working out with the same rigor to watching tv and isolating myself from others. My academic and athletic performance slipped tremendously. I went from being the class president and closer for the baseball team my freshman year to a social hermit who rarely saw the field by my junior year.

Yet, in both cases, my parents would drive weekly from Greater Philadelphia to wherever in the midwest we were playing, despite the fact that I was unlikely to see the field. It was about supporting the team, and it was about supporting me. Their love did not require me to achieve anything in particular, but it also did not pretend I was the greatest thing in the world when I obviously was not. Their love was rooted unconditionally simply in my being, while holding with it the belief and hope that one day I would be great in any number of pursuits, or perhaps several of them. My parents and I had many difficult conversations where they knew I could be better, but they also helped me understand and supported me in making the decisions that would lead me to greatness. The firmness of their support along with their unwavering love is what has allowed me to thrive throughout my life to today, and will undoubtedly continue to drive my success long into the future, and it is what I know to show to the people and things I love. In that respect, let’s take that same approach with this country that I love so dearly.

The United States has lost its way and it has been lost for sometime, growing more lost by the compounding nature of both its actions and inactions in different contexts. We cannot point the blame at any single administration, though I certainly have my biases, as administrations that are elected are symptoms of broader movements. We must recognize and understand the ways in which greed of private interests infiltrating our government and both major parties, referred to as the neoliberal consensus, has been a long strategy that is incredibly un-American.

America was not founded on the backs of huge businesses. Our Constitution is a binding agreement between a government and the people it serves. Big business is a more modern concept than our government, and the government is not only failing to regulate business for the benefit of the society it serves, but business is unconstrained in regulating the government. The private interests of entrenched wealth superseding public interests has been a long seeded plan to abuse the freedoms set forth for all of us. A multi-generational plan has been coming further and further to fruition for guardrails to be removed and for entrenched interests to run wild.

Look no further than the Lewis Powell memo from 1971 that lays out the ways in which big money must organize itself to protect itself. Perhaps it is no surprise that the following year Lewis Powell began his tenure on the Supreme Court, as courts were a core focus of the plan he laid out. We can see the carefully constructed ways in which that plan has manifested itself over the last 55 years since it was published, and the ways in which Project 2025 builds on it. The democratic party is not absolved from being controlled by entrenched wealth either. There is a reason that the party’s leadership in the recent past has existed so heavily in New York and California, more specifically in the Bay area and New York City area. Both sides have engaged in gross misconduct regarding insider trading, where elected leaders are abusing power. I am not able to point to a specific document or set of documents for the Democratic party because it is less coordinated, and so I do not know of a single strategy that carries the same weight as the ones named above. But their willingness to try to appease both wealthy elites and also speak as though they are the party of the working class is a hypocrisy that has cost them mightily. 

More and more, the political spectrum is shifting simultaneously more toward the right as a whole, while both sides are seeing more and more activity from the extreme sides of their base.  This radicalism is understood best through a trauma lens, not just on individuals but on society and its systems as a whole, where increasing stress is leading to increasing rigidity which is leading to decreasing willingness to engage with different perspectives. But we think about what this 250th birthday is celebrating, and these shifts that I am briefly describing are so opposite to what we recognize as the founding of our country. Big money has become its own monarchy. Our movement from a consensus attempt toward moderation so that we can truly stand united, together to a consensus that reinforces the extremes that drives us further apart is one of the worst ways we can possibly honor the legacy of what was accomplished in Independence Hall.

I write all of this as part of an ongoing reflection I am having, that I hope many of us are having right now, about what the next 250 years of the United States of America will bring. I think we need to look first at where anything that becomes must start, with its dream. I believe that the American Dream has been misunderstood for a very long time now. It was never about any one individual having a house and enjoying freedoms, but it was that all of us could together enjoy these things. That everyone could have a safe home and enough food to eat so that we could exist beyond the basic level of Maslow’s hierarchy and therefore reach our full potential, this is the dream that enables a society, as our country once did, to be seen as powerful and good.

I love the United States because it has not only been a society that has raised me to be a dreamer, but because the dreams I am able to have within it allow us to think about how we can transform systems so that others are also able to strive for their dreams. So long as those dreams are just and good, not impeding on others’ right to dream as well, then we can exist together in harmony. And we are going to need to coexist better to get through the crises we are facing, but as we start to better organize together, we will see the many opportunities that exist.

Perhaps we must look no further for words to describe this better than to one of the fathers of free market capitalism, Milton Friedman, “Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible become the politically inevitable.” We are undoubtedly in a crisis, or more correctly, multiple crises (polycrisis). There are, therefore, opportunities to create real change that do not come around very often. We are in a unique window to come together and transform our society for the better. I can think of no better way to honor the 250th birthday of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. 

As we reflect on this 250th birthday, let us look towards the 250th birthdays ahead that we can work to be in a better place for. There are multiple to look at, and none are the right one by any stretch of the imagination. The 250th anniversary of the completion of the Revolutionary War can probably be argued, but the Treaty of Paris that officially ended the war was signed on September 3, 1783. And the 250th anniversary of the ratification of the Constitution was on June 21, 1788. One could argue that these two, while not as widely celebrated of holidays, are as important to the birth of our nation as the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And, of course, we should think about all of these dates and what these 500th birthdays will look like.

That does not mean to take away from the importance of the day. But also for us to look ahead and think about what we are creating not just for ourselves but future generations, which feels like the appropriate way to celebrate this 250th birthday. An honest reflection of where we are, and honest and ongoing efforts to create a better future. To recognize that we all have the stated inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and to work to ensure that this is more of a reality in the future than we have ever had before, and certainly now. I wish the United States of America a very happy 250th birthday today. I love you and I believe in you. It is amazing what you have accomplished and become in a relatively short period of time on a global scale. I believe in you and hope that your best days are yet to come.