Independence Day deserves celebration

The United States of America turned 243 today and it is indeed an occasion to celebrate. The men who signed the Declaration of Independence were taking a monumental risk in doing so. There was little reason to believe that our fellowship of colonies would actually ever successfully revolt against the mighty British Empire, but we pulled it off.

And here we are, living in the United States of America — the greatest country in the history of civilization.

A snapshot of life today is a picture of a charmed era.

We live in a time when food is plentiful. With over 2 million working farms in the U.S., we are rich in agriculture and are a net exporter.

The continental United States can be traversed by airplane in just a few hours or by train or car in just a few days. We are free to travel across our land at any time we want and do it without authorization from anybody. We can take a tour in Washington, D.C., hop on a plane and get married in Las Vegas, and grab dinner in Hollywood all in the same day.

Thanks to the brilliant innovators in Silicon Valley, we now have all the knowledge garnered by human beings since the beginning of time in the palm of our hand. No longer is access to information determined by where someone grew up or went to college. A quick internet search will reveal the best information on everything, ever. A smartphone yields more knowledge in a nanosecond than the libraries and archives that stored human knowledge for millennia.

All is well in America. Even though the political climate is hot and cultural divides omnipresent, we are living in a rather placid time in our history. There are no troops in the streets or regular attacks on government buildings and certainly no military battles where American is pitted against American.

In fact, Americans are helping each other to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars every year. According to the Giving USA 2018 report, Americans lent a helping hand to their neighbors for things like disaster relief, environmental causes and other charities by giving away a total of $410 billion in 2017.

When Americans are confronted by a real, existential challenge, they unite and work to improve the situation. A common enemy of all Americans is cancer and Americans have waged war against the disease for decades by raising money for research and charities.

The efforts are working. According to the National Cancer Institute, “Overall cancer death rates continue to decrease in men, women and children for all major racial and ethnic groups,” and “Overall cancer incidence rates, or rates of new cancers, have decreased in men and remained stable in women.”

The United States of America has improved life for virtually the entire planet. Since the U.S. assumed a global leadership role after the two world wars, most other countries are freer and more prosperous than ever. In the early 1940s, there were about a dozen democracies in the world. Now there are almost one hundred.

Those democracies are not perfect and neither are we, but we strive to improve with each generation. It all began with that document signed 243 years ago today.

Happy Birthday, America.