“There is no such thing as a long, easy marriage,” a friend once told me. As I’ve sat to write my annual tribute to our nation at this monumental 250^th anniversary, amidst so much national unease, those words kept appearing, far more than other themes I’ve rejected for weeks.

In the past, I’ve written about my love of our protest. About our shared identity, one of my favorite essays. About our inherent discontent that makes us so great.

But this year feels different.

Not only for the milestone…two hundred and fifty years is a long time, longer than most nations. My ancestors, one side serving in a Pennsylvania militia before the Revolution, the other fleeing authoritarianism in Europe a century later, set in motion a chain of descendants that eventually led to me. Like every American, I inherited this experiment. Throughout the long sweep of human history, we are each comparatively blessed to be right here in America, right now.

It’s more about the mood in the air, I realize. The 250^th feels uglier than I’d hoped. It feels nothing like what I remember of 1976, which also came in ugly times, in the doldrums of post-Vietnam, a terrible economy, a scandal- and shame-filled decade. A national malaise, to steal a quote. But we knew how to honor the bicentennial in ways we struggle to today.

In the span of our national marriage, at this point, no matter what our politics, we can surely look across the living room and realize that there’s work to do in each of us toward a more perfect union.

We can’t shirk that work. It’s not enough to say that, yeah, our politicians are awful people, but the average American is not. That’s true, but that’s not the point. The awful people are supported and placed there by average Americans. I have dug deep and can’t understand why, but I also can’t understand half of what people do.

The Founding generation understood that. Every marriage has vows, boundaries, and difficult conversations about the future. Our nation’s has the Declaration and the Constitution. That framework is still there for us today.

The point now, I think, is to do what couples do in long marriages…take another step forward. Then another. There’s no manual for how to do it otherwise, as far as I know. And we all know it doesn’t always work. Our elections are our arguments along the way…sometimes productive, sometimes destructive, sometimes healing, sometimes another slammed door.

The alternatives are, often, worse. Speaking of alternatives, Ruth Bader Ginsburg once shared that the best marriage advice she had was that “it helps sometimes to be a little deaf.” That’s good advice much of the time, and we all need some of that grace politically today.

But you can’t choose to be deaf when the house is on fire, when people are being hurt. Our national house is on fire right now, and perhaps has been for some years, more than we’d like to admit, through a witch’s brew of how information is delivered, economic shifts, and social changes. People are also now, and have been recently, hurt by collective actions in our names. You can sit on any ideological dividing line in this country and agree with all of that above.

A national divorce would be catastrophic beyond words. We saw it in 1776, and my relatives later in the Pennsylvania 73^rd Infantry saw it in person at Gettysburg. It’s hard to fathom it happening today, but much of 2026 has been hard to fathom by the standards of norms.

So, it comes to each of us to be that better angel of our nature for the good of the experiment and the marriage. We should state, loudly and as I think only Americans can do, what is causing us pain, and then give of ourselves to make it better. Listen. Talk. Be a better citizen. A better neighbor. A better person. I firmly believe we each know when we are not. Pride weighs down on the realization that what we’ve done has hurt the nation. It requires courage to cast it off. Courage is in short supply these days, which is a shame in a nation forged in it.

I’ve seen the beauty of the national marriage in the past year. Explored parts of this nation I never had before and awed in the sights and diverse people. Protested. Enjoyed my freedoms. Served my fellow Americans. Read voraciously about the Revolution and our history and seen the shadows of contemporary debates all along the path. Listened to our nation’s greatest storyteller share his take on the Revolution, on the same day in New York when I walked the first battlefield in the world where a British army surrendered. That victory convinced the French to throw their support behind an upstart nation that dared to imagine a better future.

I can also imagine a better future. It should be. We cannot guarantee success, Adams said, channeling Cato, but we can deserve it. On this 250^th, please work to deserve it. Please help each other deserve it.

Stay in the living room. Look in their eyes. See the pictures of the good times hanging framed on the walls. Remember what the bad times taught. And commit to something bigger and better than us all.

Happy birthday, America. It’s my second-favorite holiday, after Thanksgiving. Both American. Both centered on a unique, beautiful, and painfully imperfect story. I adore unique, beautiful, painfully imperfect stories. The honest kind.

As a kid, I was mesmerized by the danger of the fireworks. As a man, I’ve stood in contemplated awe on July 4, from the hills of Appalachia to faraway old cities on the borderlands of war. The wildness of this day—the sound, the spectacle, the spirit—has always felt like America at its most mythic.

This year? This birthday feels heavier, the heaviest I’ve felt.

That pain—it’s American, too. It’s the sting of promises unfulfilled. The ache of reading the Declaration of Independence and realizing how relevant, how revolutionary, how unfinished it is. It’s grief in watching this grand idea—the best concept in modern history—butchered by weak people who dare to consider themselves our “leaders.” Petty. Vindictive. Power-hungry. Unworthy of the sacrifice they inherited.

Yet—the beauty remains. The beauty is there in the bones.

We hold these truths to be self-evident…

We hold this pain.
We hold this beauty.
We hold this hope.
We hold this country.

Franklin’s famous line from eleven blood-soaked years after the Declaration echoes louder than ever. Our nation was “a republic, if you can keep it.” The “you” in that sentence isn’t passive. It does the heavy lifting. It demands effort, sacrifice, discernment. It means you fight through the pain. You carry the torch forward.

Both the right and the left have gotten intoxicated on the pain. They obsess over what’s broken and overlook the beauty. The brilliance of the idea of America is not its perfection. It’s that tension. Its demand that we grow. Its hunger for better. A more perfect union.

Read the Declaration today out loud, in its defiant tone. Let it hit you like it hit Lincoln. Like it infuriated Douglass and King. Like it inspired Mandela. Like it empowered Stanton. How amazing that both the left and right have grasped onto its themes. There is no other document like it. None.

It is our scripture and our mirror.

America’s discontent isn’t a bug—it’s a feature. Our unruliness, our protest, our imperfection—they are the heartbeat of the American idea.

Light the fireworks. Grieve your pain. And recommit yourself to the work of beauty.

Happy birthday, America. May there be many more.

There is something profoundly American about walking to a New England town green, handmade cardboard sign in hand. Something profoundly American about not walking alone.

That day, some people had warned of violence and damage; there had been enough the weekend before in America. Neither came to be. Just a crowd, much younger than me, perfectly within their rights of self-expression and mildly unruly.

Unruliness is as American as apple pie, bald eagles, and inequity. It is baked hard into our DNA as a feature, not a bug. The deeply flawed, brave, unruly (White) geniuses who committed to “hang together or, most assuredly, hang separately” on July 4, 1776, took on the world’s most powerful empire, could barely stand each other, fumbled greatly, and somehow won, creating this new kind of nation.

In the place of an oppressive monarchy, they put a republic weighted on the side of liberty and the individual citizen over the government, and then specifically oppressed anyone but White men. These unruly upstarts guaranteed a difficult life for our nation and horrors for its citizens.

Long may our government come second to its citizens.

Long may our growth require difficult times, for they create opportunities.

Long may we remain unruly. Long may we doubt actions to make us less so.

We lost some of that unruliness during the pandemic, perhaps out of justified fear of the virus, perhaps out of manipulation, perhaps out of growing softer, perhaps a combination. But we generally gave it away without a whimper, and that’s troubling, because power doesn’t go back in the genie’s bottle easily. You can see it manifested in China right now against Hong Kong or the Uighurs. You can see it in the actions by many here: left and right, elected, bureaucrat, and “expert,” wearing blue, a suit, a lab coat. You can see it in history, ours and humanity’s. You can see it kneeling on the neck of George Floyd for 8:46, hands in pockets, blankly looking at people screaming for decency. People and systems don’t give up power naturally, or consider they even have to.

Unruliness is important. Malcolm X described it as swinging instead of singing, standing instead of sitting. King said that cooling off was a luxury we can’t afford. Worthy of note that they were also two revolutionary men in the same struggle, and they hanged separately. Whites hanged them both, metaphorically, and many more, literally. To pull right from the powerful Kimberly Jones video that recently went viral, we are fortunate that Black America is looking for equality, not revenge. They’re not the only ones who are owed.

Slavery, civil rights violations, power struggles, and a forced, brutal inequity are not American inventions, nor exclusive to us or our history. But our ideals make them more painful, more of a scar. We need to be and do better toward those ideals. Progress, and I’d argue historically fast progress, is undeniable but it’s not enough. It never can be.

Because I post about politics so infrequently, some friends will be shocked I marched, or shocked to read all this. Aren’t I conservative? Oh, I sure am. Other friends will be shocked I marched, or shocked to read all this. Aren’t I liberal? Oh, I sure am.

I think for no one but me. Did I agree with everything expressed that protest night on the Southington Green, prior, or after? No, of course not. Do I always agree with parties or politicians I have voted for? No, of course not. Do you? I’m frightened if so.

I’m allowed to think for myself, the last I checked, although I do question that from time to time. It’s very likely I was the only person on the Green with a sign that spoke in terms of liberty. King said people like me “come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone.

I see no contradiction between the yings of “Molon Labe” and the yangs of belief that ”the arc of the moral universe is long, but it leads to justice. ”

I see no contradiction in having complex thoughts on complex issues. We shouldn’t fear that.

We do, though, partly because of how media and information is created and weaponized, and because it’s easy. The default.

We have to choose our buckets, I’m told. Have to strut our purity like peacocks to other people in our camp. Have to unleash an online mob on the enemy we don’t know and with whom we make no pretense of personal, actual dialogue. Shut up and comply, we’re told.

We will surely hang separately on this path. We already are.

I’m privileged in every way. Well-off. White. Male. Straight. Healthyish. Have every structural and personal advantage one could want, and so many that so many fellow Americans do not. I understand the feeling of unease at the world right now, at disruption, at change. A dear friend often shares a quote she likes: “When you’re privileged, equality feels like oppression. It’s not.”

Be unruly. Be uncomfortable. Speak face to face. Engage. Listen. Learn. Stand for a better America. Yours looks different than mine, and different from others’, and that’s OK. The marketplace of ideas should be open and free. Dialogue should be heated and uncomfortable. There should be a gut-level wariness of forced consensus, of the control of thought. Opposing views should be welcomed, considered, and debated. Your beliefs challenged. Orwell, who, with Huxley, could be the narrator of 2020, said it best. “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people things they do not want to hear.”

If they’re not violating another person’s natural rights, I’ll proudly stand by any American sharing in the mix of ideas, and hope we can give the oppressed ideas the greater benefit of doubt in that intellectual marketplace. The oppressed, dangerous, unruly ideas are the ones that move us forward. Always have. The oppressed, dangerous, unruly people are the ones who do it. Always have.

There will be pain in this process. Liberty is painful. Justice is painful. Freedom is painful. Honesty is painful. Knowledge is painful. It’s also the only hope for mankind, and the spark of it all drives me. I’m a proud, unapologetic patriot for the ideals of America, and part of that means an uncompromising look at how I have contributed to and benefited from our failure to reach them.

Don’t tread on me. Don’t tread on us. Those opposed to the principles of this nation see today as a period of American weakness. It’s not. They’ll seek to take advantage of it. They’ll lose.

But we cannot walk alone through it to make that so.

So, walk.

Happy Fourth of July.