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On this Fourth of July, our nation turns two hundred fifty — a quarter millennium since a small company of revolutionaries pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to a single audacious sentence: that all are created equal, endowed by their Creator with rights no government may revoke.
It was, from the first, an aspiration more than an achievement. The hand that drafted those words also kept the ledger of human bondage; Jefferson wrote all men are created equal while men and women were enslaved on his own land. The promise outran the practice, and the distance between them is the very work of the republic.
That is not cause for cynicism but for honesty. A people who forget their history, Santayana warned, are condemned to repeat it. And in our tradition we know that naming our sins is not despair — it is the threshold of conversion, the first step of every new beginning.
So today we do not celebrate a finished nation. We celebrate an unfinished one, still laboring — as the Constitution’s own preamble puts it, and as a later president reminded us — to form a more perfect union. The words long attributed to Tocqueville still ring true as a summons, if not as history: America is good when her people are good.
Two hundred fifty years on, we can speak honestly of our failures and still speak, at the last, of hope — that most American and most Christian of words.
Happy Independence Day.
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