Well, here it is. The birthday we have been waiting for has arrived. The nation, the United States of America is now 250 years old. All that fighting from all those battles with the British have now culminated in the old empire giving up and letting go those folks we call Patriots (they called them rebels) to see if they can form their own government and will it amount to anything.
The ballsy move on the part of Jefferson, Adams and the whole Continental Congress goes back to the document they created in the early summer of 1776 that said in essence, ‘we consider ourselves self-governable’. When they made that statement, very little warfare had taken place to make good on that declaration. They just announced it and through wins and losses on the battlefield, staked everything they had on it.
If you look at the character of who we have become as Americans, the struggle of the Revolution provides tremendous insight on the people we have become. We didn’t know if we could win separation from the British, at the time the greatest empire in the Western world.
Photo: The 1783 Treaty of Paris. It remains unfinished because the British were sore losers.
But we so declared, and after six long years of battle and some help from our friends, we won.
The feat defined us and set our national agenda forevermore. Fight a later war with the British in 1813 and 14? No problem. Provoke a war with Mexico to fulfill our vision of Manifest Destiny? Let’s do it. We even took on ourselves in a struggle for just how inclusive individual freedom was, which took by some counts nearly a million lives to determine. When compiled together you begin to see who we are, based on all we have been through.
The United States was the determining factor in two World Wars, then became the police force against global communism. Along the way mistakes were made but that did not stop us. We persevered, and this weekend we celebrate.
The price we pay for this culture that has developed over more than 250 years is an individualistic society where our voice is just one of many. We count them every couple of years to see if we lean one way or another as we seek answers to emerging problems. We’ve been known to reverse ourselves as we attempt to move forward.
But that’s us.
I don’t necessarily always agree with what my fellow Americans think. But then again, neither do you. Having a right to all the freedoms listed in that other document, the U.S. Constitution, requires respect for those who see the world differently. We are not always in the majority and the pendulum swings back and forth between approaches to the problem. And that is our real strength. Those guys in knee britches back in 1776 couldn’t say definitively if the idea would even work, but they ventured forth anyway. They went forward anyway and now, a quarter of a millennium later, it endures, not because we speak with one voice but because we have the ability to speak with many.
In 1783, as they concluded negotiations to officially end the war, the Americans sat for a portrait of the signing. Guess who did not show up for the painting.
Let’s get the party started.
