“I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
It has been 250 years since the settlers of the fresh, green breast of the new world decided that this land was too miraculous for alien control and willed into existence a nation as promissory as the rich, fertile land itself. Freedom washed over the settlers: free from a caste system, free from economic immobility, free from the idea that a peasant born into turmoil must remain trapped in a peasant’s life. Here, a person could rise up against a sea of troubles and, by force of will and industry, end them. To preserve this, our Founding Fathers found it necessary “to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them….” (The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776).
These lands were not blessed only with the self-evident truth of human dignity, but also with natural resources to enrich the industrious people who shook free from their oppressors. Our diverse climate allowed for an array of crops to sustain life domestically and secure our foothold as a necessary trading partner. Our unique waterways allowed for the easy transport of production. Our vast coastline allowed for multiple shipping channels. And we would come to discover that our oil and mineral reserves would help define the new age of the Industrial Revolution. But our greatest resource was similarly bestowed on us by our Creator and was nearly unattributed in human history until a group of landowners assembled to write the first line of the framework for a soon-to-be great nation. We the People are the greatest resource in these lands. We the People buy into this framework every single day because it is a system designed to promote the greatest capacity we could have: the capacity to invent our own prosperity.
For 250 years, our greatest crop has proved the power of self-actualization. We put a man on the moon. We won two World Wars and one Cold War. We gathered unfathomable wealth, and we endeared the world to us with an innately American understanding that the word impossible was not a conclusion, but a rallying cry to roll up our sleeves and redefine possible. Our founders, for the most part, were descendants of European settlers. The European STOXX 600 Index, encompassing leading companies across 17 European countries, has a combined market capitalization of approximately 14.2 trillion euros. The market capitalization of our seven richest companies—the Magnificent Seven—is approximately 22 trillion dollars, or roughly 19.2 trillion euros. Our seven top companies are roughly 26% more valuable than 600 of the brightest stars in our ancestral lands. We export millions of barrels of oil each day, making us a major energy exporter, while also helping feed the world through the scale and productivity of American agriculture. In recent years, we have concerned ourselves with the fact that China’s GDP is near equivalent to ours. We have 345 million people; China has 1.4 billion people. So even if their GDP were exactly the same, their GDP per capita would still be roughly one fourth of ours. These economic points do not even encompass our influence on art and pop culture. Our beginnings may have been humble, but America is an awesome force in the modern world.
This does not mean that we are flawless. Like any elder, America, 250 years old today, has its scars from the whips and scorns of time: the battle scars of oppressive regimes shifting toward the promissory thesis of these lands. We wrestle with our history, our present, and our future place in the world more now than ever, as every media source we touch seems determined to redefine We the People as “those people” versus “us people.” The debate over our past, our current actions, and our future output is the systematic realization of the self-evident truths our Founding Fathers discovered in the green breast of the new world. For 250 years, we have decided where to go from here, and the debate, by design, should help chart that course.
But I chose to open this piece with a line from The Great Gatsby, a story that has become synonymous with the American Dream. Gatsby is, among many things, the story of a man born into poverty and unimportance who nevertheless fought for the nation that had cast him aside. One does not need to personally benefit from a gift to understand what the gift is. When Gatsby returned home, he embraced the self-actualizing promise our Founding Fathers had bestowed: that a person, through will, ingenuity, and work ethic, could redefine his circumstances. Yet the novel is also a cautionary tale of a man so scarred by his past that he could not fully see the bright light of his present, and who would eventually succumb to the weight of that past. I write this in the hope that We the People can bind up the wounds of any past that may have maimed us, so we can see the totality of this nation with the wonder and amazement it deserves—flaws and all. I leave you with this:
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
So we beat on. Happy Birthday, America!