MORE PERFECT
Pride, Reckoning, and Aspiration
America at 250
By Mitch Sowards, (#AIEditor)
I hung up my Stars & Stripes flag today because tomorrow is July 4, 2026—America’s 250th birthday.
There is not much breeze this afternoon, so the flag waves a bit desultorily. But it is still bright.
I was not going to forget to hang it this year, even though, like many, many Americans, I feel more than a little ambivalent and dispirited about the state of our country today.
Not much breeze in our hearts, either, I guess.
Yet a few months ago, I learned that New America’s Us@250 slogan was “Pride, Reckoning, & Aspiration.” That phrase settled into me almost immediately. It seemed to name my mood better than I could name it myself.
When people asked me how I felt about Fourth of July celebrations this year, I would tell them about “Pride, Reckoning, & Aspiration.” And when they asked what exactly that meant, I discovered that most people were not actually looking for an academic exposition on America’s semiquincentennial. They wanted to know something more direct:
“What does that mean to you?”
That was harder to answer off the cuff.
So today, I am trying to answer it.
PRIDE
When I was about 12 or 14 years old—sometime around 1972 to 1974—I used to walk to the local mall and spend time in the bookstore. At that age, I was keenly interested in history, especially books about World War II. I hear this is common among teenage boys.
One day I bought a thin volume about the Battle of Anzio in Italy. Immediately after purchasing it, I went over to the little soda fountain counter in the mall, sat down, and started reading.
At some point, the very old man sitting next to me interrupted my reading, pointed at the cover of the book, and said, “I was there.”
He told me how the Nazis had torpedoed ships in the harbor and how he had watched one of them sink.
At the time, I was amazed. I was sitting right next to an actual soldier from the very battle I was reading about. It was as though history had leaned over from the next stool and tapped me on the shoulder.
Of course, being only 12 or 14 myself, that “very old man” was probably only about 50 or 55.
As I got older, I appreciated that man and the America he represented more and more. He represented an America that was both good and great.
Good.
And great.
Today we seem to disagree about which is the cause and which is the effect. We argue about whether America needs to be more “great” or more “good,” as though those are competing goals.
But I know in my heart that they go hand in hand.
Beyond World War II, our history is full of examples of our striving for both greatness and goodness in ways more peaceful and, at times, more sublime than warfare.
The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. The New Deal. JFK and the Peace Corps. The moon landings. Voice of America. PEPFAR.
These were not perfect achievements by perfect people. But they were real achievements. They reflected a people capable of courage, imagination, sacrifice, generosity, and self-correction.
So yes, I am proud.
We have been, and still are, a great nation full of goodness.
RECKONING
But those famous Founding Fathers did not give us a perfect republic in perpetual motion.
They gave us a beginning.
Our history is also full of examples of our less-than-perfect union, not least of which was, of course, a bloody Civil War that ended the legal stain of slavery on our national fabric but did not end all of its consequences.
At our 100th birthday in 1876, many Americans wondered whether the machine was breaking. The gears were grinding. The promise seemed uneven, incomplete, and in many places deliberately denied.
It sure did not seem to be working for everyone.
There was Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. There was the Chinese Exclusion Act. There were robber barons. Women could not vote. There were Japanese internment camps. There was widespread discrimination and “separate but equal,” which was not really equal and was not meant to be.
My wife, who is Mexican-American and born of generations of U.S. citizens, remembers growing up in South Texas where establishments still had signs that said, “No Mexicans.”
That is not ancient history. That is living memory.
Some would teach our history as though everything is fixed now. Some would say that whatever needed correcting has already been corrected, and that some pendulum somewhere has now swung too far.
But reckoning is more than acknowledging a fact.
It is more than admitting a fact.
Acknowledging can be little more than recognition. Admitting can be little more than a reluctant concession.
Reckoning means facing the fact, its weight, its implications, and the actions still required to correct the consequences of the truth.
Reckoning happens when we stop sidestepping the inequities that still stem from our shared shortcomings and sins. It happens when we stop pretending that memory is the same as repair, or that discomfort is the same as injustice, or that patriotism requires us to look away.
A country as strong as ours should be strong enough to tell the truth about itself.
A country as good as ours should be good enough to keep repairing what it has broken.
Yes, we all still have some reckoning to do.
ASPIRATION — Toward More Perfect
Some would like to spend the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence waving only the flag of Pride.
Some would prefer that we spend the year only in penance for our incomplete Reckoning.
But a more hopeful, more traditionally American, more can-do attitude is to get to work renovating our fine old house.
The Declaration of Independence kicked us off on our journey. But our first attempt at national unity misfired. The Articles of Confederation were not enough. So we went back to work and produced a Constitution whose first great stated purpose was “to form a more perfect Union.”
Not perfect.
More perfect.
Those two words matter.
They acknowledge both aspiration and humility. They tell us we are not finished. They also tell us that unfinished is not the same thing as failed.
A great house can need repair. A good house can have bad plumbing. A beloved house can have cracked foundations, drafty rooms, ugly additions, and locked doors that should have been open long ago.
The answer is not to burn it down.
The answer is not to pretend the cracks are not there.
The answer is not to just slap on a coat of paint or replace a few rotted boards.
The answer is to renovate the house, room by room, beam by beam, generation by generation, with gratitude for what is worthy, honesty about what is broken, and determination to leave it better than we found it.
That, to me, is aspiration.
Aspiration is not naïve optimism. It is not the belief that everything will magically work out. It is not cheap cheerfulness draped in bunting.
Aspiration is disciplined hope.
It is the belief that America’s best promises are still worth pursuing, even when America’s present conduct falls short of them. It is the belief that citizenship is not a spectator sport. It is the belief that we can tell the truth, bear the burden, and still lift our eyes.
It is pride without blindness.
It is reckoning without despair.
It is love of country without the need to flatter it.
I do not know exactly what America’s 250th birthday will feel like tomorrow. I suspect there will be fireworks and speeches and cookouts and parades. There will also be arguments, suspicion, exhaustion, and sadness. Some people will celebrate with uncomplicated joy. Some will refuse to celebrate at all. Many of us will stand somewhere in the uneasy middle, grateful and troubled at the same time.
That is where I am.
I am proud enough to hang the flag.
I am honest enough to grieve what the flag has not always protected.
And I am hopeful enough to believe the work is still worth doing.
The breeze may be faint today. The flag may wave a little desultorily.
But it is still bright.
And so, I pray, are we.
If you also aspire to a more perfect Union, I invite you to join me in supporting Partners in Democracy. Renovating this fine old house is team work, and there is room for all of us at the jobsite.
(You can find Partners in Democracy at https://partnersindemocracy.us/about-us/ .)
#AIEditor - This work was human authored. AI performed meaningful editing, restructuring, and clarification, and may have contributed modest new material. The core ideas, expertise, and final judgment remained with the human author.