What's Next?
Two hundred and fifty years. That’s a pretty good run.
Personally, I can’t actually take any credit for that. While some of my wife’s ancestors came over on the Mayflower, most of mine came on a herring freighter a couple hundred years later. We weren’t around for half that time. Although, an ancestor of my mom’s is in a civil war painting titled, “The Death of McPherson.” Mom’s ancestor is shown in the foreground holding a rifle, as General McPherson is killed. Not exactly famous, but as famous as someone in our family is likely to become. When Mom would bring it up, my father would say, “If he’d been tending to business instead of posing for a painting, maybe McPherson wouldn’t have gotten killed.”
Of course, longevity on this good earth we call the USA isn’t everything. For instance, 734 of the people awarded the Medal of Honor were first generation immigrants, many of whom joined up before they were citizens. That’s over 20%. Something to think about in our current kerfuffle about immigrants is the number of people who defended this country despite not having reaped any of the benefits of living here. Just the other day a friend of mine sent me a message that simply read, “Why do the best of men lie in unmarked graves?” So many important people that we don’t spend nearly enough time remembering, because they’re simply not important enough. I love our country; I really do, but I will never understand our country’s tendency to think a loud voice equals leadership or that bravado trumps quiet competence. It isn’t true, it’s hardly ever true, but for some reason we keep falling for it.
I’m writing this in my office on Monday morning. The temperature was already over seventy degrees when I got up, the air was thick and warm, and the prediction had us headed for the high nineties. But suddenly the temperature dropped about ten degrees, the wind picked up, and dark clouds rolled in from the north. A change is coming that I did not anticipate. Might be an inch of gentle rain, might be hail the size of softballs – there’s just no telling. Life is like that.
Have you heard of the Two Ships Theory? The Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, holding a bunch of Pilgrims who wanted religious freedom and a chance to make better lives for their children and children’s children. But in 1619, a ship called The White Lion brought twenty slaves to Virginia, the first enslaved people in the colonies. Those two events, the theory goes, set up a conflict between people who cherished liberty and those who cherished wealth and control. Yet, it’s not that simple. Keep in mind, they burned witches in Massachusetts, not in Virginia and many of the ships that brought enslaved people from Africa were financed in New England. Some rain, some hail, and you never know which is coming.
Ken Burns has said that the American Revolution is the most important event in world history since the birth of Christ. His point is that prior to our revolution, almost everyone in the world, for almost all of time, was subject to some type of authoritarian rule, that we introduced the concept of a citizen beholden to no one, and the world was never the same.
That’s quite an ideal, and oceans of blood, sweat, and tears have been spent trying to bring that ideal to fruition. Of course, we’ve certainly wavered from it many, many times over the past 250 years. Not only wavered – enslaved people, Native Americans, and women of any creed or color didn’t make the cut as citizens for a long time. We can’t forget that.
But here’s the thing. There’s a quote, attributed to Ernest Hemingway (as it turns out, it probably predates him) that goes, “There is nothing noble about being superior to your fellow man. True nobility comes from being superior to one’s former self.”
There it is. It’s nice to look back and admire the many good and great things that have happened in this strange, wonderful place known as the United States of America, and essential to learn from the bad. But it isn’t the previous 250 years that matters. It’s what happens next.
It’s always what happens next that really matters.
Copyright 2026 Brent Olson