Happy Birthday United States

Next Tuesday the United States celebrates its 247th birthday. It was on July 4, 1776, that the second Continental Congress ratified the Declaration of Independence declaring, the United States of America.
As we approach this Independence Day, it may seem that we are more polarized than at any other time in our history. Perhaps it is a good day to stop, take a breath, and remember that despite our many differences we can all say one thing. We are Americans.
The Declaration of Independence actually had no real legal standing, but it does form the basis of what the United States stands for and what its citizens strive to achieve. It took the Constitution, adopted only after a hard-fought revolutionary war, to form the legal basis of a new nation.
Nearly 250 years after these documents were written we are still trying to put them into practice and perfect the ideals they proclaim. And it has not been easy.
A nation as diverse as the United States is going to have disagreements, perhaps more so now than in 1776 when the diversity was less pronounced. We have differences of all kinds, politically, socially, and culturally. But it is good to remember that there were some pretty serious squabbles among the Founding Fathers as well. And of course, there was that time in the 1860s when disagreements boiled over into actual Civil War.
So we have to admit that we don’t always do the right thing, right away. We probably get things wrong about as often as we get things right, at least the first time.
Wasn’t it Winston Churchill who said, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.”
And so here we are, more than two centuries after the idea of the United States of America was first declared in a document and later codified into law. And we are still working on deciding exactly what those words mean; and how they should be implemented.
The United States is still what it has always been, a work in progress.
And that is something we should be celebrating this Independence Day.
We are a nation of differences; we have all come from different places and have different ideas of where we are going. Often, not so much where we want to end up, but how to get there. And we keep trying.
Because one thing is certain. We are all Americans.