As America approaches its 250th anniversary, I find myself thinking less about celebration alone and more about stewardship.
A nation is not only sustained by its founding ideals or corrected by its honest reckonings. It is also sustained by the character, courage, memory, imagination, and everyday commitments of its people.
To love a country like America honestly is not to romanticize it. It is not to ignore the wounds, contradictions, exclusions, or unfinished promises woven into our history. But neither is it to surrender the possibility that the ideals we have inherited — freedom, dignity, self-governance, and the common good — are still worth tending.
Those ideals have, at their best, produced something real. Movements that bent the arc of history. Institutions that held under pressure. Ordinary people who chose the harder and more generous path when no one required them to. A democracy that has been challenged, contested, and corrected, and has, more than once, surprised the world by choosing to become more of what it promised to be.
Love of country, at its best, is not nostalgia. It is responsibility.
That responsibility includes telling the truth. About where we have fallen short, the wounds that have not healed, the promises that have not been kept, and the people who have unequally borne the cost of the distance. Honest reckoning is the most demanding form of love.
Our benefactor, Jack Murdock, understood something of this. A U.S. Coast Guard veteran, Jack believed deeply in this country’s potential and in the civic responsibilities required to uphold freedom. In a 1966 speech, he closed by citing Woodrow Wilson: “A nation is as great, and only as great, as the rank and file.” It was a democratic argument in the most local sense: that ordinary people, local communities, and the institutions closest to daily life are the source of a society’s strength.
We hold that conviction as part of our inheritance.
For the Murdock Trust, loving this country means investing in the patient, often unglamorous work of civic life. It means supporting the educators, organizations, museums, congregations, and conversations already doing the quiet work of repair, helping communities tell the truth about the past while imagining a more faithful future.
That is civic work. It is also, I believe, an act of love.
Over the last few months, I have shared a series on bridge-building leadership that asks what it takes to work across difference toward solutions we could not reach alone. The conversations it has sparked have encouraged me, not because everyone agrees, but because people are taking the questions seriously.
What do we owe one another across our differences?
What do we lose when we stop trying to discover one another?
What kind of people must we become if we want our communities, institutions, and nation to hold?
These feel like the right questions to carry into this anniversary.
America at 250 is an unfinished story. To love it honestly is to hold both truth and hope. It is to be clear-eyed about where we have fallen short of our ideals and still committed to the work of pursuing them together.
Jack believed individual citizens and local communities are the source of a nation’s strength. I believe that too.
This July 4th, I hope we will look for the neighbors, organizations, schools, congregations, and conversations already doing the quiet work of repair, and lean toward them.
Because the future of a nation is not only decided in moments of crisis or celebration. A nation’s future is also shaped by the ordinary choices of people — neighbors, friends, and citizens — who did not have to show up and did anyway.
Romanita Hairston
Chief Executive Officer