America at 250: A Letter from the Editor

A few weeks ago, my wife and I made the 45-minute drive to Gardnerville, Nevada, for the 116th annual Carson Valley Days festival – a can’t-miss event in this small Western town that brings the whole community together for a weekend of family-friendly fun and excitement.

This year’s theme was, fittingly, “250 Years of Freedom,” and the parade featured plenty of patriotic floats, including one giant animatronic bald eagle that flapped its wings as speakers boomed Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.” Children gleefully rushed into the streets as parade participants tossed candy into the crowds and sprayed squirt guns in the 90-degree June sun.

By all accounts, it was a perfectly normal celebration of community and country – the type of celebration that has been occurring across this country for hundreds of years. Similar festivals, parades, and carnivals are taking place in every state this summer.

But in that moment, I couldn’t help but reflect on everything that had made that moment possible. George Washington crossing the Delaware. General Winfield Scott Hancock helping repel Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. American troops storming beaches in Normandy and Iwo Jima. Hundreds of thousands of everyday Americans who laid down their lives in defense of liberty. Generations of farmers and factory workers who turned the United States into the most powerful economy in the world. A culture and a society that worked in unison to carve civilization from wilderness, save the world from fascist tyranny, defeat communism, and literally build the future.

As people milled about around me, most of them were simply enjoying the day. They were buying funnel cakes and fried Oreos, waving to neighbors, chasing children through the crowd, looking for shade, and laughing with friends. They were not thinking, at least not consciously, about the Second Continental Congress or Valley Forge or the long arc of American history. They were present in the moment, as they should have been.

But in them, I saw every generation of Americans that had come before. I saw the pioneer family pressing westward in a covered wagon. I saw the soldier leaving home for a war he did not know he would survive. I saw the Pilgrims taking those first tentative steps onto American soil with nothing but hope and faith in God. I saw the mother and father who sacrificed so their children might have more than they did. I saw all the ordinary men and women who, in their own quiet ways, built and preserved this extraordinary country.

Thomas Jefferson did not have carnival rides and evening fireworks in mind when he labored over the Declaration of Independence. He was contemplating the rights of man, the nature of just government, and the grave necessity of separating from the British Crown. But the astonishing thing about the American experiment is that high ideals and ordinary joys are not separate from one another.

The grand promise of liberty makes room for the simple blessings of everyday life. The ability to gather peacefully in a small town on a hot summer day, to celebrate openly, to worship freely, to raise a family, to speak one’s mind, and to pursue happiness in whatever humble form it takes – this, too, is part of the inheritance of 1776.

And it all began with a group of brave men who, 250 years ago, declared to the world that these United Colonies were, and of right ought to be, free and independent states. They did so knowing that they were taking on the most powerful empire in the world with a ragtag band of patriots with little more than their muskets and a ceaseless yearning for liberty. They did so knowing that failure would mean the gallows, and yet they still pledged “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.”

We don’t often consider this radical act in our daily lives. We don’t consider the audacity of the claim that “all Men are created equal.” But the fact that this truth seems self-evident to us is a testament to the success of the Declaration and the ideas that it unleashed into the world.

We also often forget just how good we have it here. In America, liberty has become so familiar that it can begin to feel ordinary. Prosperity, peace, religious freedom, representative government, private property, free speech, due process, and the ability to chart one’s own course in life are blessings much of humanity has never known. That we sometimes take them for granted is not evidence that they are unimportant; rather, it is evidence that we have inherited something so immense that we can scarcely comprehend its full value.

In one way or another, everything that we enjoy in this nation today is thanks to what occurred on this day 250 years ago in Philadelphia. The Founders set in motion a cascade of events that would change not only the destiny of one continent, but the course of human history. They gave us a republic rooted in liberty, ordered by law, and animated by the belief that ordinary people, under God, are capable of governing themselves.

That inheritance is now ours to cherish, defend, and pass on. As we celebrate this 250th Independence Day, may we do so with joy, humility, and gratitude for all those who made America possible. Enjoy this day, celebrate this nation, and never forget the blessings of liberty.

Shane Harris is the Editor-in-Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.