Today is the 236th anniversary of American independence. It would be exceedingly easy to wrap this post up in the flag and let it be. I’ve done that often enough in the past. Like most other birthdays, we don’t spend much time on the 4th looking at the things we collectively got wrong. That’s ok. We don’t go to Great Uncle Leo’s 100th birthday party and remind him about all the times he screwed up. It’s just tacky. But still, there are going to be plenty of blog posts, news articles, and talking heads eager to point out every flaw. There are plenty of other days in the year to do that. I like to think of today as the perfect opportunity to look see beyond the mindless cheerleaders and the cranky detractors and look at our country for what it really is: a work in progress.

Our founders knew times would change and they gave their fledgling republic the flexibility to change with them. We’ve made some really, really bad decisions as a country… and then we’ve changed direction to right those wrongs. We’ll make more bad decisions in the future and in time we’ll correct those too. Part of the joy of America is that we don’t usually stay on the wrong side of history for very long. In 1776, the United States was one of the few examples of a working republic in a world ruled by hereditary monarchs. Almost two and a half centuries later, only a handfull of monarchs are left and most of them exist as heads of state and not heads of government. As a new founded country we went to war against piracy on the high seas rather than paying tribute, we fought brother against brother to decide what kind of country we would be, passed up the opportunity to gather an empire of our own, stood up against laundry list of tyrants bent on world domination, and then more or less built the modern world. At the risk of sounding like a cheerleader, America is kind of a big deal.

For good or bad, right or wrong, she’s my country and I’m incredibly thankful for having been born a citizen of this great republic.