250 Candles

I’m not sure why a cemetery felt like the right place to spend the Fourth of July. But that’s where we ended up.

We were vacationing in Savannah, Georgia — one of those cities that makes you feel like time never quite finished leaving. We wandered into an old cemetery, the kind where the stones lean and the names are half-worn away. And then I stopped.

Button Gwinnett. Right there in the ground in front of me.

If you don’t know the name, he was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence — and one of the least remembered. He died the following year in a duel. Fifty-one years old. Signed his name to something that would outlast everything about him and was gone before the Revolution was even over.

A few blocks away, a monument to Nathaniel Greene. One of Washington’s best generals. Another man who gave most of what he had to something bigger than himself.

I stood there thinking: these men had no guarantee any of this would work. In 1776, the losses were piling up. Defeat after defeat. The whole enterprise looked fragile. And still they signed. Still, they fought.

That thought has stayed with me longer than the vacation did.

America turns 250 this year. I’ll be honest — I have complicated feelings about that.

I’m proud of this country. I’ve been to Nicaragua on medical missions trips more times than I can count, and every time I came home, I felt something I can only describe as renewed loyalty. With all its flaws — and there are real ones — this republic is something. You don’t fully appreciate that until you’ve seen what the alternatives look like up close.

But pride doesn’t mean pretending everything is fine. And right now, everything is not fine.

What worries me isn’t any single policy or politician. It’s something harder to name. A spirit. A posture. The sense that the whole game now is division — that there’s more power in splitting people apart than in bringing them together. Rage-bait politicians who’ve figured out that fear and fury keep the donations coming. Movements that seem to want a homogeneous culture — everyone thinking alike, falling in line, pledging loyalty not to an idea but to a person.

I don’t think that’s what the founders had in mind. And I say that not as a historian but as someone who stood at Button Gwinnett’s grave and wondered what he’d think of us.

E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one.

That’s still on the seal. I keep wondering if it’s still in us.

So what do we actually do? This is where I struggle, because easy answers feel dishonest.

I’ll offer what I’ve come to, not as a program but as a direction.

I think we’ve confused rights with responsibilities. The Bill of Rights protects freedom of speech — I believe in that. But somewhere along the way, we started treating the right to speak as an obligation to say every angry thing we think. Freedom of speech includes the freedom not to speak. To hold your tongue. To ask whether what you’re about to say helps anything or just adds more heat to a fire that’s already out of control.

I think freedom was always meant to be spent on other people, not hoarded for yourself. The freest person I know is the one least concerned with protecting his own turf. He gives, and somehow keeps getting more to give. That might sound like a Sunday school answer, but I’ve watched it be true across sixty-something years of living.

And I think we have to decide whether we actually believe what we say we believe. That all men are created equal. Not that some are more equal than others. Not that equality applies to people who look like me and think like me. All.

We light 250 candles this year.

A tattered past. A tenuous future. And somewhere in between, people like you and me are trying to figure out what we owe this place.

Button Gwinnett signed and died within a year. He didn’t get to see whether it worked. We do. That’s either a privilege or an accountability, depending on how you look at it.

I think it might be both.

If enough of us decide to take “out of many, one” seriously — not as a motto but as a way of living — maybe my descendants will celebrate 500 years.

That’s worth trying for.

It’s up to you and me.