This month we celebrate 250 years since the Birth of the United States of America
The National Mall Fair
I often wonder about those beginning moments of our nation. I think about what must have taken place in the hearts of the men and women that caused them to embark on that unprecedented journey to establish a nation. According to Eric Metaxas' article in the New York Post on June 28th, 2026:
"...the American Revolution itself, which is the only revolution in world history that actually delivered on the promises it made, to create a country where the people were in charge, a country that — in Lincoln’s famous words — was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
In the natural course of things, our country should have never happened. It was a gamble of the grandest scale, led by knowledgeable and dedicated
men and women who were not military geniuses. They simply believed that this was the correct and honorable course of action, and they had the fortitude of soul to hold on through a war that, for a majority of the time, they were badly losing. They stayed the course.
Then once again they chose to have the fortitude to do what needed to be done after the fighting was won. They came together to birth a nation. We are unlike any other. We are singular. We are the preverbal teenagers on the world's stage - the "youngster." We are not always wise. We are not always principled. We are not always just. We are flawed. However, 250 years later, here we stand. Against all odds. In spite of our humanness. We stand here on the world's stage resplendent.
Did those founders, who refused to let each other give up, see this in their mind's eye? Did they see the hundreds of generations that would live in this nation? Or did they simply have the character to see their course through to the end? I don't know the answers. I don't know if anyone can. Our founding fathers were a group of imperfect humans. They made amazing strides, yet also had blaring blind spots. They did not leave us with Utopia. In the end, they fell short of holding "these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights." They left slavery in place, failing the generations by not contending with this evil at that moment. It ultimately took a bloody civil war to abolish it.
Yet in spite of their humanness, they managed to hand to the generations a structure that could bear the weight of the growth, the storms, the mistakes, the wars, and anything else that human nature can throw at it. We survive. We withstand the "rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air" and in our souls. We are the United States. We are not one amalgamation, we are the many states and the many individuals who make up the whole. This was so beautifully seen at Freedom 250 The Great American State Fair on the National Mall for this 4th of July as people from every state proudly welcomed visitors with displays representing their state's history and products. Everyone participated and celebrated the contributions of each other.
Today there is a debate as to whether we are a "Christian" nation. While it is a fact that the Judeo/Christian Bible played a large part in influencing the foundational documents of America, I tend to think that if our forefathers heard this debate they would laugh. They did not seem to find it necessary to assign a label to their declared principles. What was necessary was the behavior of men and women who strove to be character driven and not power driven. What is evident is that we are a country that was founded with an understanding that there is a greater "Creator" that we are accountable to. The founding fathers believed that. They were accountable to the Creator, and to the coming generations, for the actions that they took in the war, and in the nation they made.
It is that accountability that I hope we as a people can, in the next 250 years, find a north star toward. I pray that we as a people can come back to keeping this accountability in the forefront of our mind. Our actions, as our forefathers, echoing in the chamber of time. I don't believe our country is on the "verge of collapse," mired in darkness and chaos, nor that the structure our forefathers gave us is failing. If it was going to fail, it would have done so 150 years ago. No. We are in a moment of the breaking dawn. We, as Francis Scott Key in the melee of the storms of countries and kings, are straining to see "by the dawn's early light what so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming." A resurgence of hope "through the night that our flag is still there." May that star spangled banner continue to wave for another 250 years over "the land of the free and the home of the brave."
Written and Contributed by Amber Bonasso Thomas
Flag image created by Lucas Sankey (@lucassankey) and used by permission via Unsplash
