I almost did not write to you this week. And then it was the Fourth, and I thought of my father, who loved fireworks.

We used to buy them on our annual pilgrimage to Wyoming’s Lamar River Valley for fly fishing, because in the West you could buy them from street vendors. My siblings and I, along with the neighbor kids, acted like Christmas had come to town in July as we sorted our arsenal by size and color and waited for the sun to go down to illicitly light them in the street near my home in Sudbury, Massachusetts.

I grew up in New England, and the 4th of July was serious business. Parades we rode our horses in. Fireworks set to music by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Tall Ships entering Boston Harbor. The Minute Men Militia reenacting Paul Revere’s ride, year after year. For the Bicentennial, I even got to have my Dad lift me high on his shoulders to see President Ford speak in Concord.

I have struggled these last few years to feel that childhood awe and national pride, because of decisions made at the very top of our government that violate laws, harm citizens, and accumulate enormous wealth and greed.

And yet, on this, our 250th, I can feel it again in my bones. Here is what I chose to celebrate today.

I am grateful for the land held in common here. John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt spoke and acted, more than a century ago, on the radical idea that the most beautiful places should belong to everyone and no one, and so we have the Cascades and Yellowstone and the Tetons and the Boundary Waters, wild country you can walk into with a permit and a pack. Writer Wallace Stegner called our parks the best idea we ever had, and on this, he was right.

I honor how we have held alive the right to be furious out loud. The country was founded by people telling their government it had overstepped, and that impulse never left. Every real improvement here came from ordinary people who refused to wait politely. The women at Seneca Falls. The sanitation workers in Memphis. The kids at lunch counters. Pride in America is mostly pride in the people who loved it enough to demand that it be better.

I deeply appreciate our military members over the centuries, and their families, who said yes to service that cost them everything to protect us and stand up to tyranny.

I celebrate the music. Blues out of unbearable pain, jazz out of a hundred cultures pressed together in one port city, and everything since built on that foundation. We took suffering and collision and made the sound the whole world dances to.

I value our showing up. When the river floods or the fire jumps the ridge, people you have never met arrive with trucks and chainsaws and casseroles. The formal institutions wobble, and yet the neighbor instinct holds. I have watched this during fires in my home state of Oregon, during floods in other cities while traveling, and on September 11 in New York.

I treasure the perpetual second chance. This is a country where still, sometimes, you can reinvent yourself, change your name, change your work, drive somewhere else, and start over.

Today I celebrate our USA.

I stand grateful for the promise we keep failing and keep returning to, that all of us are equal and free. We are not done. We have never been done.

And the striving itself, stubborn and unfinished, is the part I will honor and defend today, for this 4th of July, and for this monumental 250th .anniversary.

I believe in us.

So tell me, on this strange and stubborn birthday. What do you still choose to celebrate?

Moe