Are We Really Going to Do This?

Photo by Courtney Hedger on Unsplash

Are we really going to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our independence with these people in power?

Is that really what we are going to do, America?

Because I want you to sit with that question for a moment. Not rhetorically. Sit with it. July 4th, 2026 is coming. The bunting will go up. The fireworks will be purchased. The speeches will be written. And somewhere, in some official capacity, the people who started an unauthorized war, who ignored court orders, who sent masked men into the streets without regard for the Bill of Rights, who bent the machinery of the federal government toward the personal and financial interests of a criminal demagogue — those people will stand at a podium and invoke the Founders.

There is something vulgar about that notion. I do not have a more precise word for it. Vulgar is the word. It is a desecration dressed as a celebration. It is the theft of an inheritance narrated by the thieves.

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The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence was supposed to be a reckoning with what this country is, what it has failed to be, and what it yet might become. It was supposed to be a moment of honest accounting — the kind of accounting that a republic of laws, not of men, periodically owes to the people who built it and the people who bled for it and the people who are still waiting for its promises to be fully kept.

Instead it is arriving in the middle of a constitutional crisis. An unauthorized war. A closed strait. A supply shock that has not yet fully landed but will. A federal executive that has decided the constitutional order is an obstacle rather than a foundation. And a Congress that is, by and large, conducting itself as though the ordinary instruments of political accountability will eventually produce the correction that is needed, as though the center will hold, as though history waits for the cautious to find their courage at their own pace.

It does not wait. It has never waited.

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Thomas Paine did not wait. He wrote Common Sense in January of 1776 — six months before the Declaration — because he understood that the moment required someone to say plainly what everyone already knew and almost no one was willing to say out loud. That the king was not a father but a tyrant. That the arrangement being defended was not order but submission. That the cost of continuing to pretend otherwise was being paid by ordinary people in blood and treasure while the people with the most to lose from honesty continued to calculate whether the moment yet required them to act.

The moment required them to act. It always already required them to act. What changed was not the situation. What changed was the willingness to name it.

I am naming it.

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I have published an open letter to the Congress of the United States. I have published a letter to the American people. I have published a letter to the governors of this republic, calling on them to declare states of emergency on the constitutional grounds that federal agencies are operating outside the boundaries of any plain reading of the law.

All of these letters carry the same message, addressed to different audiences, in different registers. The message is this: the republic is not lost, but it is in danger that is real and immediate and worsening, and the people with the power to defend it are running out of time to use it.

July 4th, 2026 is the deadline that history has handed us. Not arbitrarily. Because the 250th anniversary of this republic’s founding is either going to be a moment of reckoning and renewal — a demonstration that the experiment in self-governance still has the vitality to correct itself when it goes wrong — or it is going to be a pageant. A performance. A celebration conducted by people who have gutted the thing they are pretending to honor.

I refuse to accept the pageant.

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If you love this country — and I believe most of you do, across every political division that has been engineered to keep you from remembering that you do — then the question is not whether the 250th anniversary matters. The question is what you are going to do between now and then.

You are going to make your representatives fear you more than they fear their donors.

You are going to take to the streets and make clear that the Oath of Office is not a formality, that the Constitution is not a decoration, that the republic is not a spectator sport.

You are going to remind the governors of this country that the Tenth Amendment exists, that the states are not administrative subdivisions of an imperial executive, that the safeguards the founders built into the federal structure were built precisely for a moment like this one.

And you are going to do it now. Not after the anniversary. Not after the next election. Not after the situation becomes so undeniable that action requires no courage. Now. While there is still time for the harm to be mitigated. While the window is still open. While the republic is wounded but not yet beyond saving.

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The Star-Spangled Banner asks a question. Not many people notice that. It is not a declaration. It is a question. O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Francis Scott Key wrote it in the dark, watching a battle, not knowing the outcome. He did not know, when he wrote it, whether the flag would still be there at dawn. The anthem is the question you ask when you are not sure of the answer, when the answer depends on what the people inside the fort decide to do.

We are inside the fort.

The question is being asked of us right now, in the dark, by everyone who is watching and waiting to see what we decide.

Be brave. Do something courageous. Risk losing something, because if you do not, you are going to lose everything — and in particular, you are going to lose what you owe your children: the world you leave for them.

The 250th anniversary is coming.

What it means is up to you.

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