America at 250: a love letter from a difficult family member

I’ve been a 100% red, white, and blue American for 36% of this nation’s existence. I’ve never suffered the tyranny of unjust rulers, except for the times the good nuns used wooden rulers, unjustly, on my knuckles to urge me to behave in school. Along the way, I’ve seen white smoke herald a new pope nine times, watched 16 presidents swear to defend the Constitution, and lived through the Depression, World War II, measles, mumps, whooping cough, chicken pox, teenage acne, sleep apnea, septic shock, a malignant tumor on my head, and a perfect storm of pneumonia from Covid-19 that ran up a hospital bill in the high six figures. Bless you, Medicare and Supplemental Insurance. There’s enough joint replacement metal in my body to set off magnetometers when I’m a mile from the airport. I’ve lived in places with soft powdery snow and places with soft powdery sand. I like the sand better.

I love this country. But ya know, there are times when I’m madder than hell at it.

There’s a delicious irony in learning about liberty in a classroom where you couldn’t move without permission. Sister Agnes Marie didn’t see the contradiction. But that’s America in a nutshell, a country of contradictions that enshrined freedom in its founding documents, but took 188 years between the Declaration of Independence and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to finally outlaw segregation. The nuns meant well. So, mostly, do we.

I’ve watched this country argue with itself my entire life. I was alive when Pearl Harbor was attacked, when a president was shot in Dallas, when another resigned in disgrace. I was there as we stood against fascism and communism and conquered space. I saw walls go up and walls come down. I witnessed a country that once had “Whites Only” signs, elect a Black president. And yet, through all that, I’ve never doubted this country’s capacity for greatness—or its talent for self-sabotage.

Here’s what makes me mad. We are a country capable of extraordinary generosity and breathtaking meanness, sometimes in the same afternoon. We’ll fundraise for a stranger’s medical bills while voting against policies like universal healthcare or financial safety nets that would make the fundraiser unnecessary. We’ll thank veterans at baseball games and then let them wait months for mental health care. These contradictions are not new. They’ve been here since the beginning, baked into a founding document written by men who owned other men. The question on this birthday isn’t whether America is good or bad. It’s whether we’re still trying to close the gap between what we promise and what we deliver. These contradictions aren’t just historical; they’re alive in how we live today.

We’re more divided now than we have been since the Civil War. Instead of northern and southern states, we are red and blue states, mindful of each other’s existence, yet as mistrustful as a ship and an iceberg, both blind to the collision ahead, except we’re the ones steering the ship.

We’ve gerrymandered ourselves into zip codes and sit at Thanksgiving tables where certain topics are no longer safe. The irony is that most Americans, if you catch them off guard at a diner, at a Little League game, or in a hospital waiting room are remarkably decent to each other. It’s somewhere between the local and the national that we lose the thread entirely. The ship keeps moving. The iceberg holds its ground. And nobody on the bridge seems particularly interested in changing course. That worries me more than any foreign enemy or any economic crisis. A nation that forgets how to talk to itself is in deeper trouble than it knows.

Simple gratitude is for people who haven’t been paying attention. After nine decades on this earth, what I feel is something that is harder to name — a love that has been tested, disappointed, surprised, and renewed so many times it doesn’t much resemble the uncomplicated patriotism of my childhood. I love this country the way you love a difficult family member, fiercely, impatiently, without much illusion, and without any real option of walking away. It made me. I’m in it. And on its 250th birthday, with my Medicare card in my wallet and sand between my toes, I find I’m glad we’re both still here.

In the long story of human civilizations, 250 years is still a kid figuring itself out. Maybe that’s the most American thing about us, the realization that the work isn’t finished, that the next generation gets to keep the argument alive. Maybe the argument itself is the point. I’ve been present for 36% of that argument. I’ve been loud, occasionally wrong, and sometimes right. I still believe in the experiment. Not because it’s working perfectly, but because I’m old enough to understand what it looks like when people stop believing in it altogether.

Happy birthday, America. Try to behave.

Contact Jerry at jerrygervase@yahoo.com