Fourth of July. 250 Years Later.

For years, I have written a Fourth of July column.

Until the last few years, they were proud. Joyful. Filled with fireworks, family, and an uncomplicated love of country. I believed every word I wrote because I believed the America I had been taught to see.

I don’t regret those columns.

But I still marvel at my own ability to see things the way they wanted me to, rather than the way they were.

This year, I have to go in a different direction. You won’t see me at parades, or waving flags or having a red, white. and blue bar-b-que.

But not toward anger either.

Toward hope. Toward the future.

I owe that much to the men who gave up so much to give us our Constitution. They believed in a country they could not yet see. They built a framework that depended on future generations doing their part. We forgot that part. That America is hard work.

Michael Garrett, North Carolina

Last week, after the opening of the Obama Presidential Center, North Carolina State Senator, Michael Garrett, wrote something on his Facebook page that stopped me in my tracks.

It gave me hope. There are great people out there emerging from the charred earth we call home.

I have real hope.

Not because he ignored where we are, but because it reminded me where we can still go.

So today, on the 250th anniversary of our country, I have one request.

Let’s give Michael Garrett a million new followers on his Facebook Page. Donate a dollar or two?

We spend too much time rewarding outrage and too little time rewarding wisdom. Today, let’s change that.

Read what he wrote. It’s below, as well as a link here to the actual post if you want to share or comment. Share it. Follow him. Ask your friends to do the same. Let’s spend this Independence Day lifting up someone who reminded us that America’s story is not over and that hope is still one of our greatest acts of patriotism.

As we gather with family, friends, and neighbors who believe America may be interrupted but is far from finished, let’s celebrate this day not only with gratitude for those who came before us, but with a renewed commitment to those who will come after us.

There are remarkable people emerging across this country who want to lead. Who can lead. They deserve to be seen.

Enjoy today. Enjoy each other. Celebrate this extraordinary country.

And tomorrow, we get back to the work of building the America that still can be.

God bless America, my friends.

Now, here are the words that gave me hope. CM

By North Carolina State Senator Michael Garrett.

I cried today. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t.

Four presidents shared a stage in Chicago, a thing that used to be ordinary and now feels almost holy, and I felt the tears come before I understood them. At first I thought I knew what they were. I thought they were grief. I thought I was crying for how far we’ve drifted from that morning in 2008 when so many of us let ourselves believe, all the way down, that America could be better than her history. That we could be better. The distance between that morning and this one felt like the whole sad arc of the story, and for a moment I let myself sit inside the ache of it.

But the longer President Obama spoke, the more I understood I had it backwards.

He told a story I can’t stop thinking about. The line we all know, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice, didn’t start with Dr. King. King was borrowing it from a Boston minister named Theodore Parker, who preached it more than 170 years ago. And here is the part that broke me open: Parker preached it at one of the darkest moments this country had ever seen. The Compromise of 1850 had just made it a federal crime to shelter a man fleeing slavery. In Boston, a young fugitive had been seized, tried, and marched to the harbor by hundreds of armed officers, put on a ship, and sent back south into chains. While the whole city watched.

That is when Parker said it. Not in triumph. In the dark.

He admitted he couldn’t see how it would end. “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe,” he preached. “The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve... I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see, I am sure it bends toward justice.”

He couldn’t see it. He believed it anyway. And then he kept fighting.

As Obama put it today, Parker’s words were “a declaration of faith, a defiant call, not to abandon hope or give way to fear, but to stay true to our better selves, and true to one another, and to keep fighting... even in the face of cruelty and bitter disappointment, even in the face of impossible odds.”

And that’s when my tears changed. Right there. They stopped being grief and became something else, something that scared me a little with how much it felt like hope. Because I realized I wasn’t witnessing a eulogy for a country we’d lost. I was watching a man reach down and hand us back the very thing we had set down in our exhaustion. The arc doesn’t bend on its own. It never did. It bends because people put their hands on it and pull, people who can’t see the end and reach for it anyway. People in the dark, refusing to believe the dark gets the last word.

He would not let the day be about him. He said it plainly: America’s story “isn’t frozen in the past. It has chapters yet to be written, not by one person or a few people, not by Barack and Michelle... but by all of us.” Michelle said the same thing in her own way, that the center was never about them, never for them. Look up at that building and you’ll see three words cut into the stone: You are America.Not him. Not them. You. Us. The ordinary, the unfamous, the tired, us.

And then Bruce Springsteen walked out with a guitar and sang “Land of Hope and Dreams.” If you don’t know it, it’s a song about a train, a train with room for everybody on it. Saints and sinners. The lost. The broken. The ones who’ve been left standing at every other station their whole lives. This train carries everybody. He sang it soft and aching, like a prayer he wasn’t sure would be answered but was going to say anyway, and when the last note left him he turned to the Obamas and said the only thing left to say. “I love you.”

And that’s when I stopped being a state senator, a business owner, a man with a calendar full of things that had felt urgent that morning, and became something simpler and truer. A father. A son. One American carrying the full weight of this moment in his chest, unable to hold it and unwilling to put it down, letting it move through me the way you let grief or grace move through you, because you have no choice.

Because that’s what it was about the whole time. It was never about us. It was about Jack and Charlotte. It’s about your kids, and your grandkids, and your nieces and nephews. It’s about the children down the street playing HORSE in the driveway until the streetlights call them home, who have no idea that grown people they will never meet are deciding right now what kind of country they will inherit. They are why Parker preached in the dark. They are who the train is for. Every last one of them belongs on it.

I don’t get to see the end of the arc any more than that Boston preacher did. None of us do. But I don’t need to see it to know it’s there. And from what I saw today, four presidents on a stage, a city that built a monument to hope on the very ground where a young man once arrived with everything he owned crammed into a beat-up car and a head full of stubborn faith, I am sure which way it bends. God help me, I am sure of it.

I cried today, now I know why.

So today, we celebrate the Obamas. For their grace. Their service. Their stubborn, unkillable faith in who we still are underneath all the noise and the fear and the forgetting.

Tomorrow, we get back to work.

And in November, we honor what they gave this country the only way that has ever counted, by putting our hands on the arc, and pulling. Together. All of us. Until it bends.

Push.

See less. - Michael Garrett