The 4th of July, 2026

At 250, the U.S.A. is stuck in adolescence. Let's grow up, own who we are, and get on with the challenge of becoming a democracy...

Image © Edwin Verin | Dreamstime.com

I. As a Chicago kid born in 1939, the 4th of July was a high point of my year. I decorated my bike for the local parade, blew stuff up behind our garage, and loved everything about picnics in the park, music that aroused the heart, and fireworks that amazed the eye. In the 1940s, as the U.S. celebrated its victory over fascism and headed toward the pastel paradise of the 1950s, we in white, middle-class Christian America had no doubt that ours was the greatest nation on earth.

No one talked about the fact that our freedom was built on depriving others of theirs. I knew next to nothing about the suffering called slavery on which the U.S. economy was based, or the related suffering in communities just a few miles from my home. On Chicago’s South Side, black families were (and are) mired in poverty created by “redlining,” a federal policy from the 1930s that kept public and private investment out of certain parts of the city simply because they were home to racial or ethnic minorities. Inner city poverty has never had anything to do with the “ignorance and laziness” the right rants about. It was and is a feature of a country whose DNA includes a violent and persistent strain of white Christian supremacy.

Nor did I know that the dynamics behind the horrors of the Third Reich were at work in my hometown. In the 1940s and 50s, Jews on Chicago’s North Shore did not live in Wilmette where I grew up. They lived a few suburbs away in Glencoe, a gilded ghetto created by systemic real estate practices to keep “people like them” apart from “people like us.” Even as we celebrated our victory over fascism in Europe, Americans were brewing the same evil here at home, preparing the ground for MAGA’s bigotry and the failing democracy the U.S. is today.

Of course, children can be forgiven for all kinds of naiveté—they are not equipped to handle the whole truth of any situation. But you and I are children no more. To quote the book that the MAGA regime claims as its guide to governance: “When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things.” (1 Corinthians 13:11) MAGA’s effort to erase the shadow side of American history and let ideology dictate what is and isn’t true is Exhibit A of a “childish thing,” utterly unbefitting a grown-up.

II. Today—250 years after the Declaration of Independence—America is at best an adolescent nation, one that saw fit to elect a president with the temperament of a petulant pre-schooler (or petulant teenager on his good days). For two and a half centuries, We the People have been unable to embrace the fact that the U.S. has both succeeded and failed when it comes to the claims of love, truth and justice—and that our failures have been most costly to those who fall short of white, patriarchal Christian supremacist norms. At 250, we are a textbook case of arrested development.

In our personal lives, the inability to embrace our shadow as well as our light means that the shadow will continue to limit our ability to grow, and will gain more and more power over our lives. The same is true in the life of a nation. As long as Americans are unable to say, “At times we have been a beacon of hope, and at times we have been a gateway to hell,” we will continue to be a backsliding democracy, eventually reaching a point of no return.

It’s time for the grownups in the U.S. to put away childish images of America, and face into the blessing-and-curse that we have been from the beginning—and into what it will take to give our would-be democracy another chance to fulfill its original promise. As we enter the next phase of our national life, we would to well to see this moment the way Charles Dickens saw revolutionary France:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…” (A Tale of Two Cities)

Image © Liudmyla Mazur | Dreamstime.com

III. This weekend—as I enjoy our neighborhood bike parade, picnic, music and fireworks—my focus for reflection will come from the Terry Tempest Williams quote at the head of this post, along with the words I wrote in 2011, quoted above.

The first home of democracy is not in a faded document, a distant city, or an historical event. It is much closer at hand in the recesses of the human heart, a field of dreams and nightmares where every human impulse known to history vies for dominance day in and day out.

“Each of us,” says Philip Zimbardo, “has the potential…to be saint or sinner, altruistic or selfish, gentle or cruel, submissive or dominant, sane or mad, good or evil.” Redlining and fascism begin in the human heart—and so does the resolve to create a world in which human equality is honored in theory and practice.

The first act of citizenship is to incline our hearts again and again toward love, truth and justice, saying no to all that stands against them. Every day in every way, the choice is in our hands.

IV. So on this 4th of July, I’m carrying a “Memo to Self” to help me stay focused on what it means to be a citizen in these times. Here are a few of my notes:

• If one of your liberal friends cites the latest evidence of MAGA’s greed and cruelty, and says “This is not who we are,” tell them that in your view, this is exactly who we are, pulled as we have always been between the better and lesser angels of our nature. We—all of us—helped make MAGA happen by pretending that the U.S.A. is better than it is. Without exception, all of us need to grow up.

• If a MAGA devotee talks about about how POTUS’s approach to immigration control has made the U.S. safer, tell them how sorry you are that they can’t see that his authoritarian practices are making all of us less safe, as democracy’s guardrails come down and the rule of law is replaced by an imperial presidency.

• If the conversation turns to the glories of American history, ask why some are so eager to rewrite that history in ways that create the illusion that the U.S. has never been in the wrong. Ask what scares them about a free people knowing the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth of who we are?

V. A few weeks ago, I gave a talk that touched on the struggle for the American future. When it came time for the Q&A, I was asked a question I’d never been asked before, one for which I had no ready response: “What scares you most?” I looked down at my shoes for a moment to buy some time, then the answer came: “People who don’t care. That’s what scares me most.”

I’m scared of people who don’t care that immigrants continue to be snatched from our streets and, without due process, taken to private detention centers that maximize profit by minimizing health care, nutritious food, and any semblance of comfort and safety. I’m scared of people who don’t care that one-fifth of America’s children live in food-insufficient families, while POTUS and his family have added at least one billion dollars to their wealth during the past year. I’m scared of people who can look around this country and the world and say, “The only thing that bothers me is the price of gas.”

Why do they scare me? Because caring about something more important than the price of gas is a mark of being human. When that mark is missing, I feel like I’m dealing with an alien: I can’t sense enough humanity to make a connection. I’m not going to stop trying to connect, mindful as I am of Miller Willam’s insight that “You do not know what wars are going on / down there where the spirit meets the bone.”

But for the next few months, my focus will be on the midterm elections and the chance they give us to rebalance political power. If we can’t get more grownups into the rooms where decisions are made, our adolescent democracy will not last another 250 years. With the help of the better angels of our nature, we can and we must overcome…

[NOTES: My 10 books are HERE and HERE. The Center for Courage & Renewal is HERE. I post on Substack every Friday, as time and energy allow. Free as well as paid subscriptions will always have access to everything I post.]