I was born during the bicentennial year of 1976, so when I was young, I would imagine the year 2026 as a gigantic celebration. I would turn 50. The country would turn 250. With the typical self-centeredness of youth, I thought we would celebrate these milestones together, or something like that. What an amazing American experience it would be!

But as I’ve grown older, my youthful, unquestioning fidelity to this nation (and my self-centeredness) has matured into something more complex. As a child, I naturally saw this country as an uncomplicated good. I was fortunate to be surrounded by kind people who generally treated me well, and it was natural for me to assume that was the nature of the country where we lived. As I became a teenager, I learned more about the negative aspects of American history, and I came to understand that we had made some mistakes – in much the same way that teenagers learn about their own parents’ fallibility. As I grew into a young adult, I began to see that these negative aspects were not mistakes; they were harmful choices that we had made and remade as a nation. As I have become a middle-aged man, I hold a number of truths. 

I love this place called the United States of America because it is my home. It is where I find my family and most of my friends. It is the land that I have explored and continue to cherish. It is a land with the rolling hills of Wisconsin, with the flat plains of Illinois, of butterflies and flowers and fields and forests and fireflies. 

It is a land that we robbed from Indigenous people who have lived here for generations and generations longer than the 250 years this country has existed and the 500 years since Europeans started visiting and decided to stay. It is a land that white people took from those Indigenous people through unintentional spread of disease but also through intentional military attack and appropriation. It is a land white people cultivated by importing other human beings from Africa to serve as enslaved people. It is a land where some white people owned almost all of the wealth and others struggled amid grinding poverty. Our forefathers founded a government grounded in those truths.

Those founders created a system that provided very limited freedoms to a limited set of people. We have expanded on those freedoms haltingly and with many retractions and retrenchments over the years. People – often the descendents of those whose land was appropriated and those were enslaved – have advanced the conversation about what rights we are owed. At times, we white people have joined those Black and Indigenous people because we realized that all our freedom is bound up together against the riches accumulated by the wealthy elites. 

Our government has done many horrible things on our behalf over these past 250 years, primarily in service of those wealthy elites. We have promulgated foreign wars that kill people overseas as well as our own soldiers, divert money from the good of the people, and make others more prone to attacking us. And we continue to do so. We have squeezed foreign governments through economic sanctions and other policies, which has produced monetary crises in those nations and encouraged their people to emigrate. And we continue to do so. We have welcomed those people as immigrant laborers when it served the interests of our business elites and discarded them when it was convenient. And we continue to do so. 

In many ways, we have improved the freedoms we possess. But those freedoms are contingent, and some of them have been rescinded. And others are under threat. I love that we continue to press for those freedoms and rights. I hate that the wealthy elites control the levers of power that determine whether we succeed. 

I detest that those in the ascendency at the moment seem to have a particular distaste for the working people of this country. And I understand the instinct some of us have to refuse to celebrate this country while such hateful people hold power. But I would ask: when have the wealthy elites not held power in this country? Our founders were wealthy elites who organized the systems for their own benefit. Landowners and capitalists have always exploited American working people, most severely in the system of slavery, but also through waged labor. Working people have always been exploited and oppressed. 

I do not celebrate the wealthy elites of this country. They do not represent me. They do not represent us. I do not celebrate our corporations which exist to enrich their shareholders. I do not celebrate the military industrial complex that rains down destruction throughout the world.

Instead, I celebrate the American working people, however long they and their families have lived here. I celebrate the efforts of our working people in their jobs, in their communities, in their desire to protect their fellow Americans. I love this land. I love this nation. I love our people. This is what I celebrate this 4th of July. This is what I celebrate as our nation.

Happy 50th birthday to me. Happy 250th birthday to this United States of America.

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