I am America, I am 250

I was inspired to write this after listening to Heather Cox Richardson on a Zoom call hosted by Red, Wine, and Blue. She has a lot going on these days, but what stuck with me was hearing how she's had her own team sit with the phrase "I am America" — turning it over, thinking about what it actually means to speak as the country itself. Below is where that phrase took me, as we turn 250 on July 4th.

It also happens to land right as my Civics Weekly Lessons wrap up for the season — so this feels like the right note to close on. So, here goes…

I Am America. I Am 250.

I was born on paper before I was born in fact. A declaration, not a nation — a promise that took a war, a constitution, a civil war, and two and a half centuries of arguing to make real. This week, I turn 250. I'd like to speak for myself, if you'll let me.

I don't feel finished. I never have. That was never the plan.

What I Remember.

I remember thirteen colonies that didn't trust each other half as much as they distrusted a king. I remember a summer in Philadelphia so hot the delegates kept the windows shut anyway, because they were afraid someone would overhear an idea before it was ready. I remember that the men who wrote "all men are created equal" did not mean it fully, and that it took generations of people they never imagined — women, the enslaved and their descendants, immigrants, the poor — to hold that sentence up to the light and insist it apply to them too.

I remember I have broken my own promises more than once. I remember Manzanar and Wounded Knee and the auction block. I remember I have also, slowly and never on schedule, kept promises I made in ink long before I kept them in practice. That gap — between what I said and what I did — is not a footnote to my story. It is the story.

What I Am Now.

I am 340 million arguments happening at once, which some days looks like chaos and other days looks like the only honest way to run a country this big and this different from itself. I am a grandmother in Dublin, Ohio, and a kid in a Houston classroom who doesn't speak English yet but will run for office in this language someday. I am the interstate and the county fair and the DMV line and the moon landing and the hospital bill nobody can read. I contain all of it. I have never once been simple, and anyone who tells you I used to be is not remembering me — they're remembering themselves at nine years old.

I am not a brand. I am not a flag pin or a bumper sticker or a slogan built to win an argument on cable news. I am a system of self-government that has now run, with real interruptions and real repairs, for longer than any written constitution on Earth. That is not nothing. It is also not a finish line.

What I Ask of You at 250.

I don't need to be worshipped. I have never needed that, and the people who insist I do usually want something else from you. What I need is what I've always needed: citizens who read, who vote, who serve on juries and school boards and in the hard, unglamorous middle of civic life. I need people willing to disagree with each other in the same room instead of only online. I need my history taught whole — the founding and the failing and the fighting to close the distance between them — because a country that only tells itself flattering stories stops being able to fix what's wrong with it.

I need you to remember that "we the people" was always an instruction, not a description. It was a job. It still is.

What Comes Next.

I don't know what I'll look like at 300. Neither did the people who signed their names in 1776, and they built me anyway — imperfect, unfinished, built to be amended by hands that hadn't been born yet. That's the whole design. Not a monument. A project.

So, here's what I'll tell you, at 250, the same thing I'd have told you at 50 or 100: I am not behind you, and I am not above you. I am made of you — your attention or your neglect, your patience or your contempt, your willingness to show up to the parts of citizenship that don't trend. Two hundred fifty years in, that's still the only thing that's ever kept me going.

Happy birthday to us. Now get back to work!