Two hundred and forty-six years young today! You don’t look a day over two hundred!

Wow, it’s been a wild ride, hasn’t it? You started off by declaring your independence from the world’s most powerful empire. It took eight years of blood, sweat and tears but you finally won. You drove out the mighty British Empire – no mean feat even if they were distracted with things they thought more important like war with France.

Eleven years under the Articles of Confederation. The Articles were a good try but they didn’t meet the needs of a growing country. Most nations would have just kept plugging along pretending everything was fine, but not you. Your Founding Fathers got together once again and drafted the most influential political constitution of all time: the Constitution of the United States of America.

Took a few years to add in the Bill of Rights and get everything squared away, but you completely revised your government without firing a shot or being invaded! Unheard of! George Washington was elected President, the first under the Constitution, and he served for eight years. Then he did what few men have ever had the courage to do: he peacefully gave up the power and went home to Mount Vernon. Kings around the world were in awe of what your first true Executive had done.

Times, they were a’changing. Let’s face it, a second war with Britain was stupid. The first capitol building got burned down and frankly, had Britain wanted to spend the blood and treasure, that would have been the end of our little experiment in governance by the people. Good thing we have a huge moat and happen to be high maintenance. But you have to take some risks – maybe a bit less stupid – and you have to learn from your mistakes. Part of what makes you such a great little country is that you do that learning very, very well.

It really doesn’t matter who or how slavery was introduced. You were a group of colonies and later a nation founded on faith in the Providence of God. You knew better. You’d read that Book and enslaving others, like polygamy, just a snare for the unrighteous. No finger pointing – you knew better and you did it anyway. It took eighty years before you set it right. No, it wasn’t okay, not when Wall Street sold slaves and not when Richmond did, either.

But you did set it right. Wars are never simple – we just like to believe they are – and history makes things look so much easier than they really were, but the fact remains that you did end slavery and never tolerated it again. A lesser nation would have had to be forced into it – you did it yourself, albeit more raucously than any other nation did.

You took the Industrial Revolution by storm. Britain started it, but, oh boy, did you ever make it your own! Less than ten years after nearly ripping yourself apart, you were building a railroad from sea to shining sea! By the turn of the century, cars were running down your city streets and you were even starting to fix all those old country roads. Electric and gas lights split the night. Newspapers printed daily and you were even learning how to make those newfangled Dreadnoughts in your shipyards.

Good thing, because Europe went crazy. You had already learned the hard way that industrialization made warfare a very different and bloody animal. Europe decided to learn for themselves, and paid a hideous price for it. But once the war machine roared to life, it took on a life of its own. You were inclined to just stay home and out of Europe’s business. But Europe’s business wasn’t staying on its side of the moat. The monster was growing out of control. Being fair, it had already gorged itself by the time you strapped on your sword and shield. But you’d learned a fair bit sixty years earlier and you put it to good use for the sake of the whole world.

Okay, the League of Nations wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. You were used to trying out ideas and discarding the bad ones but this was a bit different and a lot more embarrassing. But still better to try to keep the old folks out of trouble than to just let them start another feud. Pity it didn’t work.

But you did have fun in the meantime. Women wearing shorter dresses, riding bicycles, working outside the home and getting the vote at about the same time radio brought music and news instantly into the home. That stock market swelled – and yeah, buying stocks on credit is dumb. Live and learn.

Alcoholism rates at all time highs, set off by the Civil War and aggravated by the swiftly changing economy had to be dealt with. I know, everyone says Prohibition was a failure but alcoholism has never been anywhere near as high since. It takes time, effort and money to brew gin in your bathtub – and the folks who could do that weren’t the town drunks. Sure, organized crime took off – but it had already been a growth industry and the Great Depression pretty much insured it would be. A mixed bag, but those ten years did get most of the worst of the alcoholism rate problem cleared up.

Just in time for Europe to go crazy again. For a bunch of countries so fond of telling you how much older and more mature they are, they sure didn’t act it. Well, it was their problem this time. Sure, you sent some aid and told Japan where to get off with its whole ‘take over the Pacific’ thing, but you were not going to go fight, nosiree.

Until Japan thought a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor was a good idea. It wasn’t. It took nearly four years to clean up the mess made by the Axis. You would send money, materiel, and food to all the Allies, saving most from total surrender. But much more than that, you sent over sixteen million of your best men and then even some of your most dedicated women.

Your industries hummed like no other producing the countless tons of weapons, supplies and ammunition. Your fields were strained to the limit producing food for a planet – and you did it. From battleships to bullets, you produced it all. And your bravest and best bled and died using all that equipment on foreign shores to protect the one thing you hold most dear: freedom.

Round Two: the United Nations. Okay, so it’s still a work in progress. But it did work, mostly. Now there was an international framework to try to settle things between nations with something one heck of a lot less destructive than atomic weapons. Yes, you had developed them and you would use them to end the war. But they now posed almost as much of a threat as the Soviet Union and its disastrous doctrine of communism.

Well, you did try. But dictators gonna dictate. The Soviet Union would go on to put German atrocities to shame in raw scale. Seems you can’t have a nation-state where everyone works according to his ability and gets according to his need without a lot of killing, stealing and mayhem. Mayhem the Soviets were eager to spread worldwide.

And they would have, except for you. You made allies and mistakes. You supplied money and munitions and not always wisely but you kept at it. You couldn’t invade the Soviet Union but you could try to contain the contagion. It wasn’t easy, or always successful. Maybe Korea had been a wise choice, if not the best executed war ever, and Viet Nam a bad idea from the start. Maybe, but your willingness to put yourself on the line to protect your allies and even the world from falling under Soviet influence and eventual control was all that really stood in the way of a world where freedom was only a distant memory.

So while we have to build intercontinental missiles anyway, why not do it in style? It was kinda close there for a bit, but you did what no one had ever done before – you put a man on the moon and brought him home safely again. In your usual overkill, you would go on to do it five more times. Show off.

You took 76 years to fix that stupid ‘separate but equal’ nonsense. Another thing you knew better than do in the first place. Should have fixed it sooner but better late than never.

Okay, re-commissioning WWII battleships to expand your navy was pretty cool. That massive increase in your defense spending, coupled with decades of work with your allies, finally brought the Soviet Union to collapse with nary a shot fired.

You were such a cocky little thing – no other nation even had commissioned battleships and you not only had four but you had a fleet of space shuttles at the same time! I suppose it’s no wonder you thought you could do anything.

Extending a hand to China was the right thing to do – but maybe next time expect them to act like the grown ups they claim to be. Letting childish nations pitch temper tantrums is just a bad idea. Sure, they had those big, attractive, untapped consumer markets and a boatload of low skilled labor. But just because the fruit is low hanging doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a worm or two.

And sure, you were distracted. Russia was having its Roaring Twenties seventy years late. The Middle East was feeling all neglected. China was on the rise; Japan on the wane. Running the universe’s largest known kindergarten is exhausting! To make matters worse a couple idiots in their garages had brought computers to the masses. Those masses promptly discovered the Internet. Foreign policy wasn’t complicated enough when everyone found it too boring to watch on TV – now they could fuss and fight over it from the comfort of home!

When the Twin Towers fell, it was a kick in the gut. A part of you reflexively began to doubt yourself. Had you done something so wrong? Yet, you also understood instinctively that if the violent and the jealous were allowed to get away with attacking you, no one anywhere would be safe. Those who hated freedom and justice would be emboldened if they believed they could attack the mightiest nation on earth with impunity. You didn’t pretend you weren’t angry but you also didn’t let that anger rule you. You did what you believed you had to even while arguing within yourself. You’re powerful but not perfect.

Whether you went too far or not far enough is for history to decide, Your loss was not nearly as large as other nations had suffered over the course of history. It wasn’t the largest you had suffered in even the last six decades. But it hit home both literally and emotionally. Maybe that was why you spent so much time in introspection. Maybe that’s why you let things at home get a little too crazy. You weren’t so sure anymore about who and what you were and it was hard.

Hard or not, you kept on trying. Maybe more directionless than you should have been but deep down, you knew that you had to care not only for yourself but for the whole world. It’s a huge weight and you made mistakes but you didn’t ever quit.

The last few years have seen the intolerable happen on your own shores. The part of yourself that remembers who you are is starting to wake up and set things to right. Better, you’ve started to correct some of your worst mistakes. No longer do your courts pretend that anyone has a right to murder an unborn baby. It took you forty-nine years – but the important part is you did it. You’ve begun to once again protect the freedoms you hold sacred: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Oh, it’s gonna be messy – it always is. But you aren’t afraid of hard work. Rolling up your sleeves and getting the job done is second nature to you. Of course, now that you need to be busy at home, the kindergarten is acting up. Russia gonna Russia and China is, well, not a special as it thinks it is. That, too, is gonna be messy and a royal pain to deal with.

But you will deal with it. You are the United States of America. This is who you are and what you do: pursuing righteousness, justice, peace and freedom.

Happy Birthday, America! And many more!