“When the fireworks sputter and the big band ebbs and the weekend’s twilight creeps across our towns, what will it have meant? What will be the mark left on our hearts and on the soul of our nation? ”
This week, accompanied by jubilant voices from coast to coast, the John Jay Institute celebrates the 250th birthday of the United States of America. Here, in Philadelphia, billboards remind every traveler that this is uniquely OUR birthday, harkening to the City of Brotherly Love’s inimitable role cradling this nation at its most formative and most vulnerable years. Our friends in Washington, DC, share pictures of the Great American State Fair. Inboxes and mailboxes alike fill with limited-edition Americana clothing lines, lifestyle accessories replete with stars and stripes, and every conceivable marketing ploy to lure our wallets and purses into the festivities.
This week, it is here. Next week, it will be history. So I ask you: when the fireworks sputter and the big band ebbs and the weekend’s twilight creeps across our towns, what will it have meant? What will be the mark left on our hearts and on the soul of our nation?
Growing up, I heard stories of my grandfather’s under-age enlistment into the Marine Corps prior to the US’s declaration of war against the Axis Powers. In the early days of peacetime, he bivouacked in Seabiscuit’s stall in Hawaii and later flew Curtiss Commando aircraft in and out of the Battle for Iwo Jima. My other grandfather grew up with deformed feet because his Depression-era family couldn’t afford new shoes. He regaled my childhood imagination with tales from his time as an Air Force intelligence officer in the Korean War. Such were the times of my grandparents.
For those reading, such were your times, or your parents’ or grandparents’ times. In our various ways, we have all gazed deeply into history’s eyes and drunk of their glassy memories. These were not just the heroes we read of in history books: they were those at whose feet we learned and grew to love.
History is full of sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, grandmas and grandpas. The 250 years of exceptionalism we celebrate were wrought by neighbors, teammates, coworkers, classmates. The “Shining City on a Hill”, the “Last Best Hope of Earth”, the “Land of Opportunity”, the “Great Experiment” was learned and manifested at the feet of those who came before and whose common acts wove uncommon legacies.
It is good to venerate the men who signed the Declaration of Independence a quarter of a millennium ago, thus granting identity and place to a fledgling movement and its people. But perhaps, amidst this year’s festivities, the most consequential takeaway is the blood, sweat, and tears that have bourn up those Founding truths and have since given this nation its place. It is only through 250 blessed but grueling years of hard-fought victories, crises of conscience, awakenings, deathblows and renaissances, and miracles, that we can now look back at our Founders and raise our voices in loud approbation. It is through the fidelity, resolution, and amity of every generations’ citizens that our Founders’ light shines so brightly today. There was genius and Providence in the Founding. The bar was set high, and subsequent generations have risen to that challenge. Must we not now gaze in awe at the whole grand edifice before us and humbly grasp the hammer and brush in hand, grateful for the honor that is now ours?
I often concern myself over the prospects of a society with no more World War II veterans to consult, no memory of a world torn apart by Communism, a generation of young professionals unaffected by the sights of planes crashing into the World Trade Centers, of smoke gushing from the Pentagon. But the truth is, while each of these times had their forges of heroism, so do all times. Every generation of men and women must remember, act, overcome, and build. The times will demand it of them as every time has demanded it of those who stand for something noble.
On this 250th birthday of the United States of America, it is my hope that our nation takes this moment to drink deeply of the nobility of its birth and regale one another with the tales of those who carried the torch from Independence Hall through two and a half centuries of adventure and delivered that torch to our doorstep. The muffled step of that messenger’s leathery footfall inside our threshold, the clink of the spurs, and the sacral smoke of that timeless flame bring us to our senses. The messenger has much to share. This week, may we all have the humility to listen; and next, the courage to act.
On behalf of all of us at the John Jay Institute, have a blessed Fourth of July. And as you go forth, recall these words of the great Philadelphian, Benjamin Franklin: “The longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth — that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings that ‘except the Lord build the House they labor in vain that build it’.”
Gratefully,
Ross Hougham
President
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