Happy birthday to us!

Next Saturday, our country will be 250 years old. I have been around for seventy of those. So, I’ve seen some things.

We are just back from a trip to Europe. One of the advantages of traveling is perspective. Looking at America from across the ocean is like astronauts looking at Earth from space. It’s lovely, with a gauzy surface, and it looks a bit fragile.

Ben Franklin was asked during the Constitutional Convention. “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”

He replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” 250 years later, we’re working on that.

Some of my time in the Czech Republic and Poland was spent trying to grasp a thousand years of history. For the great majority of those years, common people worked hard, tried to feed and protect a family, and hoped to avoid bad things happening.

Power, wealth, and control were most often concentrated in a royal class or an authoritarian leader or more recently the Soviets in those countries. Most people had only limited control over their lives and opportunities. Of course, that’s why our ancestors left everything behind to cross the ocean.

In the late 17th century, the Enlightenment was fomenting across Europe. Notions of freedom and autonomy and value of all people were circulating. These were rightfully perceived as a threat to the ruling class. Much blood was shed on the way to the modern democracies that make up Europe now.

It was a fortuitous twist of history that the United States was being birthed right then. All the “truths that we hold to be self-evident” would not have been evident in most places, in most of time. The white men who signed the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, gave us soaring ideals and a structure of governing that was wholly unique upon that time.

Notice I wrote “white men” there. Here, complications begin. Black men were in bondage, and women were subservient 250 years ago.

I want to interject right here that one can love this country and look honestly at its flaws. There is a crazy and ultimately dangerous notion that we need to cover up the bad things that have happened here, and that this is patriotic. That is wrong on so many levels.

Maturity means being able to hold two thoughts in your head at one time. We can do this.

I love our country.

Slavery was an integral part of our history from its inception. It is a horrible institution that treats the slave as inhuman and makes the slave-owning class complicit in terrible sin. The Civil War cast out slavery as a legal form. But Jim Crow would be a vessel for racism for a century anon. And racism persists today.

The things that happened to the Native Peoples are another appalling fact of our history. The poor state most of their descendants live in on reservations goes on.

At least two million civilians have been killed by Americans in our military efforts in my lifetime. It’s difficult to count the innocents killed in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.

All this is true. And I love our country.

It’s complicated. The older I get, everything is complicated.

Each of us as citizens alive at this moment in time have responsibilities. Certainly, how we vote is large. But beyond that, just being a decent neighbor and kind person does our tiny piece to help America rise to its ideals.

I don’t need to tell you we are in a time of great division. To some degree that has always been so. I was alive in the Sixties when Vietnam, rights marches, and assassinations reflected deep schisms.

But now social media allows us to engage every hour in mocking and hating the other side. A high tide of crassness results. Our president just called a previous president a “stupid son of a” word I won’t use here. We know Nixon used such language, but he didn’t send it out in tweets.

A big number like 250 is an opportunity to stop and reflect before we forge ahead with the next 250 years. I mentioned the Enlightenment and the notion of all humans having worth and inherent God-given rights. The actual practice of those in each individual life and in our laws is not a straight path.

We can see in our last century rights and freedoms given to women, minorities, and immigrants.

Are we backtracking on those?

Perhaps. History will judge that.

For now, we don’t have the luxury of seeing backwards. We’re in the moment, and there may be things we have to fight for. We can watch it go by, or we can engage as citizens to defend those less powerful.

There are those who promote the idea that we are a “Christian nation.” I would suggest that then we act like it. There are real ways we can “feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and shelter the homeless.” Cutting social programs and foreign aid to pay for a giant tax cut for the wealthy conflicts with that.

I am Christian to my core. But we are not a “Christian nation.” We are a nation where all faiths are welcomed.

That is where America’s greatness lies. Each man, woman, and child is as respected as every other.

This is still referred to by historians as the American Experiment. A democracy where all citizens are granted liberty and freedom was unique on the Earth 250 years ago. It will always be an “experiment.” It will never be perfect and the class who had the power in earlier times will always take it where they can.

Right now, an ineffectual Congress and a supplicant Supreme Court have tarnished the checks and balances the founders created. We’ll see how far down the path we go toward concentrating power in one person. It’s concerning.

Ronald Reagen referred to the United States as a “shining city on a hill.” He meant that this country can serve as light and a model to all nations. Two-hundred and fifty years after our birth, we still can be. We celebrate our founding and steel ourselves for the work ahead.

God bless America.

— Randy Krzmarzick farms on the home place west of Sleepy Eye, where he lives with his wife, Pam.