Happy birthday, America
Around the world and across generations a familiar scene has played out many millions of times, different in the details, yet identical in the main. Families gathered around a table for a final meal in the only home they had known. Young men and women stared at the ceiling, alone, awake, nervous, waiting for the morning when they would leave all that they knew. In the morning, they would leave for America. They are us, and we are them, connected inexorably and infinitely. We are Americans.
The great civil rights activist and legendary Georgia Congressman John Lewis understood better than most the chasm of hypocrisy that existed between America’s splendid ideals and apartheid reality. He absorbed them blow by blow as he peacefully marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. When the police clubs crashed into his skull, it broke, but his spirit did not. Instead, his love, patriotism and courage breathed new life into the American revolution. His indomitable moral courage was amplified by a talent for forgiveness and a servant’s heart. His life left profound lessons from his grace and wisdom. Perhaps his simple observation about our divisions, difficulties and challenges is worth remembering:
We may have come here on different ships, but we are all in the same boat now.
Indeed we are.
Today, we celebrate an anniversary of a historical event that forever changed the world. In fact, it marks the beginning of a new epoch of human civilization. We celebrate a Declaration of Independence, and the courage of the men who signed it. We celebrate their vision, genius and sacrifices. We celebrate a gift and an inheritance that have endured and expanded through sacrifices, suffering, war, depression and suffocating oppression. Today, we celebrate freedom.
Today, we celebrate the 248th anniversary of the independence of the United States of America. Let freedom ring.
Freedom does not eliminate suffering, poverty, discrimination, unfairness, cruelty or hardship, but it makes it possible to fix what is broken and imagine new possibilities. The freedoms to think, believe, love, create, sing, write, dissent, protest, imagine, dream and worship are elemental to human happiness, dignity and spirit.
All men are created equal.
These are transcendent and glorious words. They are our creed, and they belong to all of us today. Perhaps most importantly, they belong to the generations of unborn Americans who will remember our difficult era with the same indifference we show the challenges and difficulties of our ancestors.
The greatest republic in human history will celebrate its 250th anniversary in 2026.
When the fireworks commence tonight, as President John Adams predicted they would 248 years ago, they will fall over a nation of 333 million free men and women who are comprised from every nation on Earth. They worship as they choose, and pursue happiness in their own way. There will be no knock at the door tonight by the secret police in America. The state will not put its jackboot on the neck of a single citizen and informants won’t make lists of who is going to church. We are free.
The aspiration towards freedom is universal and its sustainment is hard. In the end, today is a celebration of freedom that requires a recommitment by each citizen to its preservation and expansion. So long as there are humans on Earth there will be some who seek to oppress and author the lives of others. There will be regimes that seek to control every aspect of a human being’s life and purpose.
Freedom is precious and rare. Americans need to remember that. With quiet humility, they must understand that we are trustees of an inheritance that we are obligated to hand down. Look around tonight and remember, you can’t love your country if you hate half of the people in it simply because they disagree with you. That is what being an American is all about.
Defiance and dissent are in our DNA. Freedom is our birthright, obligation and destiny.
Today, we sing “Happy Birthday, America.”
In Trump v. United States, SCOTUS made it clear that we are not free in America. If one man is above the law we live in a tyrannical state in which we can not enjoy any of our natural rights because we live in a state of perpetual insecurity.
Before this decision Trump made his intentions clear; he said he would be dictator for only a day. A dictator for a day installs throughout his administration only those slavishly loyal to him and thus becomes a de facto dictator for life. Trump has accomplished this with his SCOTUS appointees allied with previous Republican appointees Thomas, Alito, and Roberts.
If he is elected and populates the DOJ with men like Eastman, Clark, and Giuliani the televised military tribunals he called for to try critics like Cheney, Kinzinger, Biden et al, will become a reality and none of us will be safe.
No longer will our government "promote the general welfare." It will exist to aid, enrich, and comfort those least in need and scorn and blame our problems on the most vulnerable among us, those long victims of persecution, immigrants, non-"Christians," and those whose immorality exists only in the minds of religious extremists.
People like Mike Flynn will determine our foreign and defense policies and we will ally with Putin and other dictators and spurn our traditional democratic allies.
I'll be 80 soon, yet my heart is breaking for the country my grandparents came to in search of the American Dream, a dream in grave danger.
Thank you for this fine letter and especially for the poignant first paragraph. The images of our parents and grandparents nervously, sadly, preparing to leave their homelands for an uncertain future is reflected in our upbringing. In my case, it was the Irish songs, beloved by my father's parents, that my Dad always played on our record player; my English mother's yearning for her homeland, reflected in the keepsakes that decorated our house; and I was present for my Vietnamese wife's last day with her family (21 Apr 75), an event that haunts me to this day. All four of these immigrants became proud Americans. May it ever be so and may we all strive to make an America in which all of us can take even more pride.