Gratitude

answering the bounty for which have received with a thank you and an open heart to our fellow citizens

Introduction

There are times, in my darker moments, when I find my normally optimistic self feeling quite overwhelmed by our current circumstances. This feeling of despair is, by the metrics, completely unjustified. America in 2025 is freer, healthier, and more pluralistic than at any time in our history. If we measured our nation not by its feeds but by its streets, we’d see a country still striving, still imperfect; but far better than it was 57 years ago at the time of my birth.

Sadly, progress, like character, rarely goes viral.

When I say “far better”, it must not be seen as some sort of hand-wave toward perfection. My claim here is very specific. That, by reasonable, measurable criteria of human flourishing, the United States in 2025 is substantially improved relative to 1968 across multiple dimensions that affect the everyday lives of our fellow citizens.

When I say our nation is far better I do so not to whistle past our anxieties, nor to blink at the polarization that so noisily attends them. I do so rather, to observe, with the dispassion of statistics and the witness of ordinary life, that by every measurable token of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, more Americans live fuller, freer, longer lives than their grandparents could plausibly have imagined. Yet we reside, somewhat stuck, in an age when our instruments of discourse are tuned to outrage. We mistake the hiss of grievance for the hum of decline. Social media, that vast amplifier of spleen, measures anger rather than progress; it confuses the heat of emotional immediacy for the light of moral truth—and so persuades us we are collapsing, even as the scaffolding of our common life grows sounder and more humane.

I confess a certain weariness in having to spell it out again, as though reminding my compatriots of their own good fortune were some novel act of persuasion. I have devoted more than a fair share of these substack’s to this theme—America’s stubborn vitality, her quiet competence, her daily decencies—all in the vain, but necessary, hope that good news might, for once, go viral. One dares to imagine that such tidings might yet take root in the hearts of our fellow inhabitants of these United States, quickening in them that old affection for one another as neighbors, not combatants; as fellow citizens, not caricatures. Alas, the algorithms do not reward amity, and so I persist, typing against the current, trying to remind a distracted republic of our better angels.

In the aftermath of another No Kings Day, I should like each of us, irrespective of party, to pause and be grateful for our collective progress.

Material Well-Being

It is an odd feature of our national mood that plenty so often disguises itself as privation. We inhabit a republic whose material abundance would have seemed a delirium of luxury to our forebears, yet we speak of decline with the somber conviction of Job. In 1968, the American household possessed a single rotary phone, a car of modest reliability, and a television with three channels (four if you lived in a college town)—each a minor miracle of its age. Today, the median citizen carries in their pocket a device that outthinks Apollo’s computers, shops a global marketplace, and commands conveniences that emperors once dreamed of. That they can now order discontent as easily as dinner does not alter the arithmetic: our comforts have multiplied beyond reason, while our gratitude has, somehow, not kept pace.

It is not merely that incomes have grown, though they have; it is that options have proliferated—the quiet dignity of choice extended to nearly every corner of life. The working mother, the first-generation student, the retiree with access to medicines once reserved for the wealthy—all inhabit a material democracy unimaginable half a century ago. The poor today are housed, fed, and connected in ways that would have been the envy of the middle class in the year of Woodstock. That we still bicker over the fairness of distribution is the mark of a conscience enlarged by success, not proof of its absence. Want endures, yes, but it endures amid plenty, and that paradox itself testifies to progress.

And yet, as with all progress, the peril lies in abstraction. We have become so accustomed to the altitude that we no longer sense we are flying. The language of crisis clings to us because the old satisfactions now seem banal; outrage offers the only flavor strong enough to cut through our own abundance. Here, again, the screens betray us: they whisper that others are cheating, that the pie has shrunk, that envy is a form of justice. But material well-being, like liberty itself, depends less on arithmetic than on perspective. A people convinced of its ruin while surrounded by wealth is not deprived—it is merely ungrateful, and that is a poverty of the soul.

Freedom & Legal Rights

Freedom, like oxygen, is most often noticed in its absence. For all our lamentations about liberty under siege, the ordinary American in 2025 enjoys a scope of personal autonomy that would have startled his grandparents. The law no longer enshrines the cruelties they took for granted: segregation, marital subservience, the criminalization of love. The citizen today may speak, vote, and marry according to conscience without fear of the state’s knock at the door. This is not a minor civic housekeeping—it is a moral reformation accomplished within a single human lifetime. The miracle is less that we have advanced so far, than that we speak of it so little.

The evolution of rights in this country has been less a revolution than a relentless accumulation of decencies. Every generation has pressed against the moral perimeter and found it movable. The enfranchisement of the young, the disabled, the dispossessed—all testify to a republic still capable of self-correction. That these gains were won through conflict is no indictment of the nation’s character; it is, in fact, the proof of it. For freedom in America has never been handed down like a royal charter—it has been demanded, litigated, and reaffirmed by citizens unwilling to accept hypocrisy as heritage.

Yet liberty, precisely because it has grown so habitual, now labors under a strange fatigue. We mistake its ease for its guarantee. The modern citizen, secure in their rights, toys with illiberal fancies as though they were harmless abstractions. They forget that every liberty they enjoys rests on the invisible scaffolding of law—debated, drafted, and defended by generations less cynical than themselves. The right to dissent, to publish, to assemble, even to mock authority—these are not mere indulgences of a tolerant regime; they are the very mechanics of self-government. To treat them lightly is to invite amnesia, and our self induced amnesia will be the prelude to servitude.

And still, there is cause for gratitude, which is the noblest form of vigilance. The long arc of American liberty has bent, not toward uniformity, but toward inclusion. Toward the recognition that freedom, a non-zero sum good, loses none of its value when shared. It is a rare political alchemy that can reconcile individual sovereignty with collective order, and rarer still that it endures for two and one half centuries. That ours does is reason enough to stand a little straighter, to argue our politics without despair, and to remember that freedom, for all its noise, remains the quiet triumph of civilization.

Health & Longevity

Health, that most intimate of blessings, has a curious way of slipping beneath our notice until it falters. In 1968, an American could expect to live scarcely seventy years; the heart attack that felled his father at fifty was a family inheritance, not a medical anomaly. The hospital was a place of dread, the doctor’s word an oracle unchallenged by data. Today, we monitor our pulses on our wrists, we replace organs as casually as tires, and we regard cancer survivorship as a statistical expectation rather than a miracle. We have not banished mortality, but we have postponed its tyranny—and that is a revolution in the human condition which is now disguised as routine.

Our medical triumphs are not the work of genius alone, but of systems that learned to care in aggregate. Vaccines, sanitation, nutrition, emergency response. Each of them a thread in a vast civic tapestry woven over decades of trial and reform. A newborn in Mississippi or Montana enters a world where infant mortality has fallen by more than seventy percent, and diseases that once decimated classrooms have been reduced to footnotes. Even our vices are treated with compassion; addiction is now a diagnosis, not a moral condemnation. The science is dazzling, yes, but the moral progress—the widening of empathy to include the sick, the aged, and the mentally unwell—may be the deeper achievement.

Yet, as ever, comfort breeds its own perils. We are a people who live longer and fret more. Our grandparents feared polio; we fear gluten. The same prosperity that fills our hospitals with miracles also fills our feeds with alarm. Every ache is a symptom, every symptom a scandal. It is, by my way of looking at it, the paradox of abundance: in gaining mastery over disease, we have acquired new anxieties about health itself. The body, once accepted as mortal, has become an idol; its fragility intolerable to a generation accustomed to repair.

Make no mistake, the ledger reads in our favor. To live in twenty-first-century America is to inhabit a society that has, quite literally, redefined what it means to grow old. The stoop and cough of one’s seventies have given way to the marathon and memoir. Medicine has not merely prolonged life; it has expanded the theater of what life can contain: work, travel, affection, purpose. We are, on the whole, not only living longer, but living better, and that, like freedom itself, deserves to be counted among our quiet glories.

Knowledge & Access to Information

Knowledge, once rationed like grain, is now poured upon us in torrents. The library that once anchored the ambitious town is now compressed into a handheld screen, and the world’s accumulated scholarship is no more than a search term away. A young person in rural Kansas can lecture themselves in Mandarin before breakfast; a grandparent in Maine can audit astrophysics from MIT before supper. The university, once a cloister, has been democratized into a global commons. It is, by any fair measure, an epochal achievement. The emancipation of intellect from geography, from privilege, from gatekeeper.

And yet, abundance can dull the palate as easily as scarcity can starve it. We are awash in data but parched for discernment. The same technology that collapses distances also collapses hierarchies of truth; all utterances, from the profound to the pernicious, arrive dressed in the same pixels. Once, ignorance was the province of those denied education; now it is a lifestyle choice, subsidized by algorithm. The tragedy is not that we know too little, but that we no longer agree on what it means to know at all.

It is here that the old parable of Babel reasserts itself with prophetic irony. As the story goes, humanity once built a tower to reach the heavens, and found its project undone by the confusion of tongues. Today, we have built a digital Babel. It is an edifice of information so vast that we can no longer hear one another across its tiers. We have achieved communication without communion, fluency without understanding. The very instruments that promised a universal language have multiplied dialects of grievance, leaving us shouting into the firmament of our own design. If the ancients mistook ambition for divinity, we have mistaken connectivity for wisdom. The punishment is the same: tribal dispersion.

Gratitude, however, must have the last word. For all the noise, this age remains a marvel. The means of learning, of self-improvement, of human connection are broader and fairer than at any time in our history. The question, then, is not whether knowledge has triumphed, but whether wisdom will catch up. If we can relearn humility — that oldest of intellectual virtues — we may yet transform our Babel from a warning into a workshop, a place where understanding is rebuilt not as a monument, but as a meeting place of minds.

The Environment

The story of the American environment is, in truth, one of quiet redemption. Within living memory, our rivers caught fire, our skies burned brown with the exhaust of industry, and the very word pollution was spoken with resignation, not revolt. The nation that had split the atom and reached the moon could scarcely see across its own horizon. Out of that murk arose a civic awakening—citizens who demanded air fit to breathe, water fit to drink, and landscapes worthy of their children’s awe. The Environmental Protection Agency, born in the Nixon Administration, not of ideology but of conscience, became the most effective custodian of public health since the Founders first set aside land for the common good.

In the half-century since, the transformation borders on the miraculous. Rivers once dead now teem with life; forests have reclaimed scarred hillsides; emissions have fallen even as prosperity has soared. Technology, so long the culprit, became at last an instrument of salvation. Solar + Battery and wind power—once dismissed as romantic indulgences—now rival the old engines of carbon in cost and reliability. The American city, cleansed and revitalized, stands as proof that wealth and stewardship need not be adversaries but allies. It is a testament not only to engineering, but to moral progress; to a people who learned that dominion, rightly understood, means care.

As with all hard-won gains, vigilance can falter more quickly than virtue fades. Even now, the current administration toys with dismantling the very scaffolds that lifted us from the smog. Regulations painstakingly refined are waved away as nuisances; the vocabulary of “rollback” and “energy dominance” masquerades as reform. But history is not so easily unlearned. The air remembers its cleansing; the people remember their power. For every statute weakened, a thousand innovators labor to make its spirit obsolete through ingenuity. The tide of humanity—its conscience and its creativity—tends to move one way only: forward towards greater efficiency and lower costs.

Let us then take solace not in complacency but in continuity. The stewardship ethic, once radical, has seeped into the civic marrow. Children learn to recycle before they can read; investors now speak of sustainability as a precondition, not a fad. We will quarrel, as republics do, over means and mandates, but the direction of travel is settled. The land and the citizen have struck a quiet pact: to heal one another, generation by generation. And if Washington should forget, the wind will remind it, and the light will persist, indifferent to politics but obedient, still, to hope.

Social Tolerance & Representation

It is perhaps the most heartening paradox of our time that a nation so noisy about division has, in practice, become vastly more inclusive than at any prior moment in its history. The old hierarchies—of race, of gender, of creed—still cast their shadows, but they no longer rule the room. The public square now accommodates faces and voices that were once pressed to its margins. In 1968, representation was a polite fiction; in 2025, it is a statistical fact. From Congress to classrooms, boardrooms to broadcast studios, the American mosaic has come into its own. The republic has at last begun to resemble its rhetoric.

Progress, of course, has not made us gracious. We are a people who quarrel even over our virtues. The same social revolution that opened the gates of belonging has also opened new avenues of grievance. Every victory of inclusion seems to spawn a counter-movement devoted to policing its boundaries. Our culture wars, so often derided, are in a strange way the price of our success: they occur not because liberty has failed, but because it has multiplied. We argue now not over whether we should include, but how. This is a subtler quarrel, and a nobler one, though it rarely sounds that way on television.

It is tempting to lament the shrillness of our age, but shrillness is what democracy ought to sound like when it is working too well. The volume has risen because the microphone is finally shared. Those who once had to shout from the fringes now speak through the same amplifiers that once excluded them. The discomfort this produces is not a symptom of decay, but of growth—of a polity learning to harmonize a chorus of accents without losing its melody. Freedom has always been a cacophony before it becomes a creed.

Though our screens would have us believe otherwise, the moral direction of America remains forward. Each generation inherits not perfection, but permission: the permission to live openly, to love honestly, to dissent without exile. Representation is not a finished project—it is a rehearsal for empathy. That we perform it awkwardly, even angrily, is to our credit; it means the conscience still breathes. In the end, tolerance is not a mood but a discipline, and this republic—noisy, uneven, magnificent—continues, against all odds, to practice it.

Democracy & Rights

Democracy, like an old cathedral, is less a monument than a perpetual restoration project. Each generation finds cracks in the masonry, patches them with new law or custom, and hopes the scaffolding holds. Ours has held remarkably well. For all the fashionable talk of democratic decline, the American experiment has withstood coups of cynicism that would have toppled younger regimes. It has endured civil war, depression, pandemic, and populism in various costumes—and yet, each morning, the republic awakens, somewhat rumpled but intact. That continuity is not an accident of history; it is the stubborn genius of a people who prefer amendment to overthrow.

When the founders wrote of “a more perfect union,” they did not mean a finished one. They presumed improvement to be endless, and participation to be the price of freedom. Over the decades, our democracy has widened its embrace—admitting the disenfranchised, enfranchising the silenced, and tolerating the noisy. The right to vote, once rationed by property, race, and sex, now stands as the most inclusive franchise in human history. The courts have become both forum and conscience, extending rights that legislators feared to touch. That such progress has been contested is no proof of weakness; it is, rather, the liturgy of liberty itself.

And yet, the peculiar pathology of our moment is not oppression but exhaustion. Freedom has made us restless; participation has made us weary. We mistake the noise of democracy for its failure. The sheer frequency of elections, debates, and decisions leaves the citizen feeling more spectator than sovereign. Into that fatigue seeps a dangerous temptation: the wish to be governed more efficiently, to trade the slow grind of consent for the brisk certainty of command. It is an ancient seduction, and it always arrives draped in the rhetoric of reform.

Technology, for all its democratic promise, has accelerated this fatigue. Once, the citizen received their political diet in measured courses—an editorial, an evening broadcast, a neighborly debate. Now they swallow it by the megabyte, seasoned with outrage and served without pause. The digital town square, meant to amplify participation, often reduces it to posture. It rewards the emotional over the rational, the partisan over the patient. And in so doing, it corrodes the habits that sustain a republic: listening, compromise, and the slow, unglamorous work of governance. Democracy survives on attention, and attention is the one commodity modern life seems determined to exhaust.

Still, there are reasons for faith. For every headline announcing democratic decay, there are a thousand unseen acts of civic decency—poll workers rising before dawn, volunteers registering new voters, citizens serving on juries, teachers explaining the Bill of Rights to students who may yet redeem it. The true measure of a democracy lies not in its elections alone, but in the millions of micro-commitments that make those elections possible. These small fidelities, stitched together, form a national fabric stronger than any demagogue’s pull. The republic endures not because it is flawless, but because it is practiced. Daily, stubbornly, and often thanklessly.

In the end, the health of our democracy depends less on the elegance of our institutions than on the character of those who inhabit them. Rights, however enumerated, are inert until animated by conscience. The ballot is not sacred because it guarantees virtue, but because it guarantees choice—and with choice comes responsibility. To vote, to argue, to dissent, to compromise—these are not burdens but privileges of the free. If we remember that, if we can see participation as a form of gratitude rather than grievance, then our democracy will continue its improbable run. For the true miracle of America is not that it was founded free, but that it remains so.

Global Leadership

It has, of recent, become a kind of intellectual sport to proclaim the end of the American century. Every generation rediscovers its fatigue and mistakes it for decline. Yet the evidence of history remains obstinate: when the world trembles, it still looks instinctively toward the same star-spangled-banner republic. Power may have grown multipolar, influence diffused, and confidence uneven—but the grammar of global order is still written in an American idiom. From the architecture of trade to the protocols of the internet, from the satellites above us to the vaccines within us, the quiet infrastructure of modern life bears our fingerprints. Empires impose; America, when we are at our best, invites.

Leadership, of course, is never permanent. It must be re-earned, and the bill is moral as well as material. Our greatest export has never been the dollar or the drone, but the idea that power is answerable to principle. That faith has wavered at times—Vietnam, Abu Ghraib, the long hypocrisies of rhetoric untethered from restraint—but it has not vanished. For every misstep abroad, there persists the deeper instinct toward generosity: the disaster-relief plane that lands before the cameras arrive, the student visa that changes a life, the innovation freely shared. A nation capable of self-critique is still capable of leadership, for humility is the only credential the world truly trusts.

If the twenty-first century demands a new American calling, it is not conquest but coherence. Our ability to model liberty without arrogance, confidence without contempt. The world does not require us to be flawless; it requires us to be faithful—to our promises, our allies, and our better angels. And in this, our record remains enviable: a republic that argues loudly, stumbles often, but still manages to stand for the proposition that freedom, however untidy, is preferable to fear. The baton of leadership may pass among nations, but the rhythm of hope—the belief that a people can govern themselves and yet care for others—still carries an American beat.

Conclusion

Civic resilience is not a trait that can be legislated or engineered. It is the slow alchemy of habit, hope, and humility—the moral musculature that allows a people to withstand the shocks of history without surrendering to despair. America has had its share of tremors: assassinations, recessions, impeachments, riots, pandemics. Each seemed at the time to signal the unraveling of the great experiment. Yet the experiment endures. Not because we are immune to failure, but because we are stubbornly unwilling to accept it as final. Our republic’s genius lies not in its perfection, but in its recoverability.

We are a people given to drama, and so we mistake turbulence for collapse. But the true measure of a democracy is not the absence of storms—it is the capacity to rebuild the roof while the rain still falls. In that respect, our civic record is exemplary. When institutions wobble, citizens improvise; when trust erodes, volunteers step forward; when leaders disappoint, communities recalibrate. This instinct for self-repair is our national inheritance. Tocqueville saw it; Lincoln relied upon it; and every generation since has, in moments of crisis, rediscovered it anew.

Still, resilience is not self-sustaining. It requires cultivation—through schools that teach civics as more than slogans, through media that prefers truth to traffic, through leaders who prize stewardship over spectacle. It requires citizens who remember that patriotism is not a reflex of pride but an act of service. To love one’s country is not to flatter it, but to tend it—to mend what is frayed and preserve what is sound. A resilient republic is, at heart, a republic of caretakers.

The greatest threat to our resilience may not be tyranny or terrorism, but indifference. The temptation to retreat—to let cynicism substitute for engagement, to let contempt masquerade as clarity—is the slow poison of self-government. When we cease to believe in the possibility of common purpose, democracy becomes mere arithmetic: ballots without brotherhood. We survive our crises only by remembering that disagreement is not disunion, that politics is a quarrel among kin, not enemies.

This is why our most urgent repair must be moral before it is political. No constitution, however elegant, can save a people who have forgotten how to see one another. The Founders entrusted liberty to the citizen, not to the algorithm. They presumed that self-government demanded self-command—that a free people would practice the virtues that freedom requires. If we wish to keep our republic, as Franklin warned, we must first keep our tempers.

Perhaps it is time, then, to rediscover the oldest civic virtue of all: charity—not as sentimentality, but as method. To reach out, not because it is fashionable, but because it is the only thing that has ever worked. We cannot argue each other into grace, but we can behave our way toward it—one kindness, one conversation, one concession at a time. The experiment endures precisely to the extent that we practice the commandment upon which both democracy and decency rest: to love our neighbors as ourselves.

That love need not be grand. It can begin in the ordinary courtesies our politics has forgotten—the willingness to listen, to forgive, to assume good faith. It can dwell in the small acts of mercy that never trend online: the teacher staying late, the stranger offering a meal, the neighbor who checks in unasked. These are the quiet ministries of civic life, the yeast in the American loaf. They will never make headlines, but they have a way of keeping the nation from going stale.

So let us, in the spirit of our better angels, lay down the cudgels of grievance and take up the harder work of care. Let us argue fiercely, but never cruelly; disagree honestly, but never without hope. The republic does not need unanimity; it needs affection. And if we can recover that—if we can look upon one another not as avatars of factions but as fellow travelers in this improbable democracy—then our resilience will not merely persist. It will flourish, and with it, the promise that this grand, untidy, ever-mending nation remains worthy of our faith, and of our love.

I know my generation grew up on a healthy dose of sanity. Receiving the communion of Fred Rogers and Jim Henson turned out to be very good for our souls and the embrace of others. May all of us find the personal grace to carry forward those neighborly instincts to our current political encounters.

If, by Rudyard Kippling

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!