The Unifying Speech We Won’t Get This Independence Day

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0:30Ross Douthat:My fellow Americans, on this, the 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. 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, Montana, a small city just outside Glacier National Park. And one of the places we thought about staying was the Kalispell Grand Hotel. And 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.

1:21Ross Douthat:And to my surprise, there was a picture of the Kalispell Grand Hotel. My great-great-grandfather built it. His name was Blair Bryce Gilliland, and he built all kinds of things around Kalispell. We had driven past monuments to my own ancestors without even realizing it. And the reason we didn't realize it was that 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 100 years.

2:04Ross Douthat: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 multi-generational 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.

2:52Ross Douthat:We need that spirit of new beginnings now. I'm an optimist about America. And for most of our history, that was a normal thing to be. But these days, optimism can seem in short supply. Americans are polarized as never 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 globe. 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.

3:46Ross Douthat: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 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 each other, 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 the high frontier of space travel, the moon within our reach again. Mars may be coming closer every day.

4:26Ross Douthat:There are territorial frontiers here on Earth that could be opened. If Albertans or Cubans or Australians would like to be Americans, 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 are also internal frontiers, ways to transform our own country that technological progress might make possible. bringing more 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.

5:14Ross Douthat: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.

6:04Ross Douthat:Since the 1600s, my own ancestors have begun again as Mainers, as Virginians, as Arkansons, 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, unto 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.