An Explosive 250th
I just got home from our town’s fireworks display. The weather was a bit damp, but we had an umbrella in the car, and the rain was hardly a drizzle. The display, however, was absolutely marvelous! They must have dumped all my personal taxes on those fireworks. And I am delighted the money was so well spent.
The essential spherical shape of each burst reminds me of the essence of reality itself. Every bright speck of light exists in a particular relationship to every other spark. The pattern is constantly changing. That is life. The points of light appear to race away from one another, much as the galaxies of the universe are receding from each other. Yet, at the same time, they are encompassing ever greater space with every passing second. Those two realities together become a metaphor for life, the universe, and everything.
This is 2026—a year I never imagined I would live to see. It is also the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I took the time to read the entire document again.
Of course, the phrase “all men are created equal” remains the epitome of human hope. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness still describe our deepest aspirations. We will return to those.
But what struck me most during this reading, in the midst of our current political season, was how most of the grievances against King George III echo what we are coming to think about the current leadership. This government seems more interested in preserving its own power than serving the people. The Declaration reminds us that distrust of concentrated power is not a new American impulse. It is one of our oldest traditions.
History also reminds us that corruption eventually discovers its own limits. Selfishness can consume a nation for a time, but it cannot sustain one. The cost of that lesson is often painfully high. Innocent people bear much of the burden. Yet again and again, Americans have found ways to recover what seemed lost.
This nation has never perfectly embodied the ideals it proclaimed. From its founding in 1776, through the terrible reckoning of the Civil War, and into the responsibilities that followed the Second World War, America has repeatedly been forced to confront the distance between its principles and its practices. The very man who wrote that all people are created equal lived in a world that denied equality to many. The industrial age often valued profit above persons. The pursuit of happiness was too easily confused with the accumulation of wealth and power.
How America has struggled to live up to its philosophy—and how often it has struggled to ignore it. The battle within the American experiment can almost be summed up in a single word: democracy.
Democracy is noisy. It is inefficient. It is argumentative. It often appears irrational. Yet only through the continual clash of ideas can free people hope to move closer to justice. Sometimes we fail so completely that only then do we rediscover why liberty matters and why democracy, for all its frustrations, remains worth defending.
So here’s to the next 250 years.
May we continue moving toward those proud, impossible ideals that have always stood just beyond our reach. They are unattainable—and therefore forever worth pursuing.
For this is not merely a homeland.
We live in HOPEland.
