Thoughts on the 250th Birthday of America

America is 250 years old today.
Our history is a crazy house of cards, yet somehow, we are still here.
And that is worth celebrating.


I have only been around for about a fifth of America’s journey, but I can report that being American is a wild ride that can get complicated fast.
Because at its heart, the American story is a cowboy journey.
Its borders are its ranch, its rodeo, and its open plains all wrapped into one.
Most Americans are not Indigenous to this land, which makes the whole thing complicated from the start.
We are a nation made from people arriving, staying, building, taking, leaving, surviving, and trying to decide what we owe one another now.
On one side of my family, I am a first-generation American. My mom came here with her parents and half her siblings after World War II to live the American dream.
On the other side, my family arrived in America in the early 1600s, on both branches.
Later, faith carried both family trees west.
One side included Christian preachers moving across the country. The other crossed an ocean to help build The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I was raised to fulfill the Mormon dream.
Instead, I grew up and took a different path -- not a rebellious path, exactly. Just one that felt more honest to me.
At the time, that was controversial. But it was allowed. Even as a female.
And that can be rare in this world.
It's also one of the things I love most about being an American: The right to follow your heart where it leads, choose your own destination, and build a life with people who are still allowed to disagree with you.
To be American is to dream big, collaborate, and try to build a better system without demanding that everyone become you first.


To me, being American means having the heart of a cowboy without becoming the villain.
It means being evolved enough to take abuse without becoming the abuser, while still winning somehow.
It means learning how to thrive in a place where the standards are supposed to be universal, even when people keep trying to rig the game.
You can cheat and try to get away with it. Many do.
You can use religion, wealth, power, fear, or popularity to make yourself feel bigger.
But in America, if you create public harm, a spotlight will find you, your choices will be publicly examined, and the cost will be counted and assigned to you.
Some people resent the Constitution and the Bill of Rights because they limit their ability to make everyone else live by their rules.


Just take a look at the first ten rights Americans inherit:
  1. You may worship, speak, publish, gather, and complain to your government without asking permission.
  2. You may keep and bear arms because a free people must be prepared to resist a government that becomes corrupt. The Second Amendment is not a hunting clause; it's a right to fight a corrupt government with a well-armed militia.
  3. No government soldier gets to confiscate or make use of your home in times of war or peace.
  4. Your body, papers, house, and effects are not open game for people with status and authority. Search and seizure must have cause.
  5. You have rights in criminal prosecutions, including due process, protection from double jeopardy, and the right not to incriminate yourself.
  6. If accused, you get a speedy public trial, a fair jury, the charges against you, and the right to face your accusers and build a defense.
  7. You have a right to a trial by jury.
  8. The law prohibits excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel and unusual punishment.
  9. The law acknowledges that people have more rights than the government can name.
  10. Powers not granted to the federal government remain with the states or the people.
That is a wild inheritance -- perfect for cowboys.
And then, on top of all that, hundreds of thousands of people come to America every year to participate in the dream ... or derail and abuse it.
As someone who has been here for one generation on one side of my family and roughly four hundred years on the other, that gives me a lot to ponder.
I do not put my head in the sand about history. As my bio says, I am curious on purpose. And I listen.
I believe in the rights and legacies of the nations who were Indigenous to this land before my forefathers arrived. I have followed the family trees that led to me. I have read journals. I have looked at the systems that shaped the places my ancestors entered.
I know that one early forefather in my line arrived from Portugal around 1620 and built himself up within a colonial economy that used indentured labor, including prisoners transported from Britain.
People were shipped across the ocean and bound to years of labor. Some later received clothing, land, money, weapons, or other “freedom dues” and were released to pursue their own fortunes.
That is not a clean story, but it's also not one that I need to sanitize to love my country.
It's the ground beneath my feet leading to where I am right now.
My grandmother’s side of the family also arrived around 1620. Family lore says that forefather was seventeenth in line for the British throne, or something close to that. I have never verified that. Safe to say, he came to America for adventure and never went back.


That side of my family eventually went into trains and toy-making.
My grandma always loved that her father made toys for Christmas all year in their basement, and how, in one day, they would be picked up and shipped to stores as toys made by “Santa’s elves.”
My grandma was always proud that her dad was one of Santa’s elves.
And perhaps that is the American story, too.
A nation can be built from ambition, hardship, migration, grief, invention, compromise, conflict, prayer, labor, and somebody making toys in a basement so children can believe in magic for one more year.
America’s history may be messy, but its dream is clear.
The dream belongs to everyone who joins the nation, even if we have not perfected justice for all.
It's a dream we have not achieved it yet, but it's the right every citizen to pursue it and see how far they can get.
Because the American melting-pot experiment is built around an uncertain question:
Can people with different cultures, beliefs, histories, and hopes coexist in shared space without starting a war and tearing it all down?
To be American is to be willing to fight for someone else’s right to disagree with you.
... to pray to a different God than you ... to love differently than you ... to build differently than you ... to speak from a place you may never fully understand.
Faith should be voluntary, never be compulsory for citizenship, equal rights, or human dignity.
To be American is to be a warrior in a garden who makes a point not to throw the first punch in civics class -- not because everyone is harmless or equally good -- but because everyone has a history that may not be healed in full, and because coercion is not the same thing as conviction.
In America, you can believe however you wish to believe, but when your beliefs create harm for your neighbors, you will be treated as the problem.
You are a cowboy now.


You are in the land of “Leave No Trace” and “Try to leave the place better than you found it.”
These ideals are very inborn to me, which makes me think fate made the right move when it made me American.
Am I the best American?
Not by a long shot.
I can do better. I can rise higher. I can keep learning where my own blind spots live.
But the thing that has never been lost on me is that America gives ordinary people a platform to question power:
  • Speech
  • Protest
  • Organizing
  • Voting
  • Courts
  • Juries
  • Faith
  • Conscience
  • Each other
I love that you can worship and pray how you wish, but cannot make it a law that your neighbor or enemy must worship exactly like you.
I love that you can own a gun, or not. Your neighbor can make that choice too.
I love that America assumes power can corrupt and gives citizens tools to challenge it.
I love that when I travel, strangers sometimes tell me things they would never say publicly in their country because they believe an American can hear an unpopular idea and consider it without authoritative judgment.
America is not perfect. I have read history books that made me sob over what has happened in the last 250 years.
I pray to be part of a generation that makes some of those wrongs as right as possible, even generations later.
But I can still say this: I am glad I get to be part of the American experiment.
I am glad to live in a nation where race, religion, color, creed, origin, and every other label can thrive.


Because in America, you are a cowboy surrounded by cowboys and everyone is allowed to dream.
Happy 250th birthday to that America.
Thank you for having me as a citizen.
And God bless the American dream.
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