My fellow Americans: On this 250th anniversary of our great republic, I think we’re unlikely to have a unifying address from any politician. So, I thought I’d get a little dressed up and offer one myself.
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A few years ago, I exercised one of my most important birthrights as an American. I drove with my wife and kids across the country — Connecticut to Seattle, 3,000 miles in a crowded minivan.
One of our stops was Kalispell, Mont., a small city just outside Glacier National Park. One of the places we thought about staying was the Kalispell Grand Hotel. After the trip was over, a little while later, I was in my dad’s house, looking at a collection of family artifacts from my grandmother’s side of the family. And to my surprise, there was a picture of the Kalispell Grand Hotel.
My great-great-grandfather built it. His name was B.B. Gilliland, and he built all kinds of things around Kalispell. We’d driven past monuments to my own ancestors without realizing it.
After B.B. Gilliland helped build Kalispell, his son didn’t stay there — he left and started over in Southern California. And then my own father, his grandson, married a woman who had come west from New England and they started over back in the Northeast.
That’s a lot of fresh starts in a hundred years.
Right now, America is arguing about our national identity again: whether the truest American is the new-arriving immigrant who swears an oath or the multigenerational American whose ancestors bled at Saratoga or Gettysburg or in Vietnam.
My family, on both sides, has been in this country for a very long time. So maybe it’s not surprising that I think there’s a way of being American that’s a cultural inheritance.
But part of that American culture is also the very thing that brings immigrants to our shore: the knowledge that here, you can begin again. Not just once when you leave behind an Old World identity, but over and over across multiple generations.
We need that spirit of new beginnings now. I’m an optimist about America, and for most of our history, that was normal. But these days, optimism can seem in short supply. Americans are polarized as seldom before. We’re pessimistic about technology and afraid of various apocalypses.
And yet for all this, I don’t think there’s any country in the world that’s better off than we are right now.
Many of our problems are problems all over the world, and here in America, we still have unique resources to overcome them: comfort with ethnic and religious pluralism, powerful protections for free speech, an unusual spirit of patriotism, an enduring faith in God’s providential care and a spirit of why the F not? that still has the power to amaze the world.
One of the lessons of the last few difficult decades, I think, is that Americans are just not made for stasis and stability. Tell Americans that they’ve done everything important already, that the frontier is closed and the only question now is how to divide our riches equitably or make sure that our achievements are “sustainable,” and they will tune out, turn on one another, and fall into despair.
But I’m here to tell Americans that a heroic age is still ahead of us, that the frontier is open once again. There is a high frontier of space travel: the moon within our reach again, Mars maybe coming closer every day.
There are territorial frontiers here on Earth that could be opened. If Albertans or Cubans or Australians want to be Americans, then maybe they should be. Taking Greenland by force is madness; seeking Greenland in a fair exchange is as American as, well, the great state of Alaska.
Then, there also are internal frontiers, ways to transform our own country that technological progress might make possible, bringing water to the arid West, planting forests in the southern plains, making cities grow and deserts bloom. The age of monuments should come again: We should complete the great statue of Crazy Horse that my children on our cross-country trip saw looming unfinished near Mount Rushmore. And we should build statues of Lewis and Clark on bluffs over the Mississippi or Missouri like the statues of the Kings of Gondor that greet the Fellowship of the Ring. And the wealth of our Tolkien-loving technologists should beautify our cities as the wealth of our industrialists once did.
Finally, there is the frontier that every American can reach out toward, which is the future itself — open to everyone who resists the false sense of human obsolescence.
America began in revolution, and today the most basic human actions can be revolutionary. Everyone who builds, who plants, who marries, who has a child, who makes a new beginning, reaches for the next American frontier.
Since the 1600s, my own ancestors have begun again as Mainers, as Virginians, as Arkansans, as Montanans, as Californians. They have begun again as pig farmers and bicycle salesmen, as lobster fishermen and lawyers, as artists and poets and now, God help us, as newspaper columnists.
And I hope that my own children, all five of them, and their children until generations in the distant future will always have the same chance to start afresh.
This is the promise of America. And it’s the reason that the future is still ours, the next 250 years and more than that if God so wills it.
And so my fellow Americans, let us begin again.
Thoughts? Email us at interestingtimes@nytimes.com.
This episode of “Interesting Times” was produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Victoria Chamberlin and Rochelle Widdowson. It was edited by Jordana Hochman. Mixing and engineering by Isaac Jones and Efim Shapiro. Cinematography by Marina King. Video editing by Mac Abdi. The supervising editor is Jan Kobal. The postproduction manager is Mike Puretz. Original music by Isaac Jones and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, Julie Beer and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Andrea Betanzos. The executive producer is Jordana Hochman. The director of Opinion Video is Jonah M. Kessel. The deputy director of Opinion Shows is Alison Bruzek. The director of Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. The head of Opinion is Kathleen Kingsbury.
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