July 4th Jubilee
America is the moral protagonist of the modern world. Sorry, Europe.
There are countless examples of real goodness—even greatness—in other nations, and I am of course grateful for all of them. But goodness and protagonism are two different things on entirely different scales. The protagonist is the one the story happens through, the one that drives the plot. Among nations and among men, there are many who can explain the crisis, but there is the one who fixes it. America is that nation.
And I have never doubted this: if a civilization-level threat ever rises against humankind—like an asteroid from the sky, or a plague out of the Arctic permafrost, or some darkness with no name yet, the flag on the shoulders of those who go to meet it will be American.
Even the imagination of our critics concedes this fundamental truth. Watch almost any film about the end of the world, made anywhere, by anyone, including people who resent us. When the cavalry arrives to save the day, look at the flag. Humanity has already cast us center stage.
We can know it as true because it has been proven again and again on smaller stages throughout history.
It was an American pilot who wiggled his wings over Berlin so the children below would know the candy was falling, children of a city we had been bombing three years before. It was America that built the weapon that ends wars and ends worlds, held it alone for four years, and used it for peace and not conquest—the only monopoly on annihilation in human history, unused. It was an American who gave away the cure for polio and, asked who owned the patent, said: could you patent the sun? Tonight every GPS device on earth will find its way by an American constellation, maintained at our expense and broadcast free to all. And when men finally left Earth itself, they were Americans, and they planted our flag on the moon, leaving beside it a plaque signed for everyone: we came in peace for all mankind.
No other country in history carries this legacy.
The country was mere weeks old when the British hanged Nathan Hale.
Washington needed intelligence behind enemy lines on Long Island and Hale volunteered. He was caught quickly and hanged without trial, and the Army’s intelligence branch, my branch, still dates itself to the little group of volunteers he was a part of. Before they hanged him he said perhaps the most based sentence of all time: I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.
He was probably quoting Joseph Addison’s Cato, the same one Washington would stage for his freezing officers at Valley Forge. And so, our first martyr died in quotation, with even his dying words an inheritance.
His last feeling was not fear or pride, but regret that the gift was too small. You mourn the limit of what you can give only when you love something past your own ability to do so. One life felt insufficient to Nathan Hale.
And he was right, one life is insufficient. That is the subtle truth of this day, framed by flags and fireworks. One life has never been enough, and countless heroes have given theirs willingly.
America has never asked any of us to be sufficient alone. It asks us to hold the country for a few decades, manage it, and hand it forward in better condition than we were given it. Two hundred and fifty years of other men’s lives is our inheritance today.
I have a three-year-old daughter and tonight she will watch her country’s 250th birthday from my shoulders, the same place the flag sits on the men who go to war. Of everything I will ever carry for this country, she is the lightest, and the most important.
I only regret that I have but one life to give for it. Then again: handed on properly, one life gives twice.