Bolder at 250

I was born in 1975, so I have zero memories of the bicentennial. But everyone who lived through it tells the same story: parades, flags on every porch, block parties that spilled into the street. A country throwing itself a birthday party and meaning it.

Fifty years later, I'm not sure we could pull that off. And I don't think that's a red or blue observation. I think it's just true.

A Proud American, Even Abroad

I've always considered myself a proud American. I know what it means to be born in a place and time that handed me a life I might not have gotten anywhere else. That's not something I take lightly.

But when I travel, I try to blend in. I don't advertise where I'm from. (My very German face helps with that one.) Here's the thing I've learned from years of playing it low key overseas: Americans aren't always well liked out there. At best, we're misunderstood.

A few weeks ago, that idea landed a little closer to home. A small group of us, all women, were talking about someone we'd all watched operate from a place of real privilege, someone pretty insulated from how most people actually live. One woman in the group, originally from northern Europe and now living in the US, said she hadn't really clocked it as unusual. She just figured that was how Americans were.

I felt my face get hot. I wanted to correct her. I told her that wasn't true, not of the Americans I surround myself with, anyway. But I also couldn't honestly tell her she was wrong. We can be privileged, especially set against the rest of the world. And a lot of us take that for granted without ever noticing we're doing it.

The Ground We've Actually Won

Here's what I keep coming back to, though. I grew up without much. But who am I to say my life has looked all that different from that woman's? American women, whatever our starting point, have come a long way.

We got the vote. We got to open a checking account without a father or husband co-signing for our own money (yes, that took until the 1970s, but still). We fought for the right to make decisions about our own bodies without a man in a suit making them for us. We can marry who we love now or not marry at all. We can walk away if it doesn't work.

That's real ground. Hard won, generation by generation.

What Breaks My Heart

Watching some of that ground shift backward has been hard to sit with. Pay equity still isn't equity. The ceiling everyone talks about hasn't actually cracked. And the last thing I want, for my daughters and for every girl coming up behind them, is to watch rights we fought for get quietly walked back ten, twenty five, fifty years.

That part isn't political to me. That part is personal.

I believe everyone should get to live their life the way they choose, safely and on their own terms. I think about Malala Yousafzai and I get a little more ornery every year at the idea that her work, and the work of women like her, could be for nothing. I want a world where it doesn't matter what gender you are, what you believe, who you love. Where the world feels like it was built for you too.

Where I'm Landing

I won't get the bicentennial my parents talked about. The porch buntings, the unselfconscious pride, all of us agreeing on what we were celebrating. That might not be this year's story.

But I can tell you what this 250th means to me instead. I'm walking into it a little bolder than I used to be. A little more willing to say what I actually think. And a lot more empathetic than

I've ever been in my life.

Maybe that's its own kind of celebration.