Dear USA on your 250th,
Writing this letter to the USA on its 250th birthday was an emotional undertaking but offered some needed reflection. I recommend you give it a try, then let me know what you come up with!
What I wrote below is based on one of the writing prompts in yesterday’s Writing Prompts for USAs 250th post: Write a letter to the United States on its 250th birthday. Thank it for something, ask it difficult questions, and share your hopes for its next 250 years. Or write whatever feels intimately honest in this letter, as you are directly addressing the USA on its birthday with your thoughts and feelings.
My experience writing this: For this piece, I just went with what came out as I was writing, kind of like it was a free writing exercise. At first, I was concerned with coming across as too angry but… ya know? Desperate times and all. However, I will say that this writing experience was incredibly cathartic, and I feel much better for having written what I wrote and oddly… more hopeful now. I recommend you give it a try!
Dear USA on your 250th birthday,
I’m not sure if you’re going to get this message, mostly because there isn’t really a direct address in which to send it. Not anymore. Your House is divided and in shambles, both figuratively and literally. After you took a wrecking ball to it, both figuratively and literally. And I still can’t fathom why.
Regardless, your address is no longer the People’s House, which has been converted to a space for lawn fights to entertain the elite few who are far, far removed from your humble, rabble-rousing beginnings, as you are from remembering the demise of gladiators who were nothing but pawns to history, and the rich.
Is this really what you want? To allow them to mock the pawns of history who made you who you are, or perhaps ignore history altogether? When your very ground is sowed by “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” underneath your address in the stars and stripes waving above all our heads?
“The nation that destroys its soil, destroys itself.” Don’t you remember?
Even your Reflecting Pool seems embarrassed to reproduce your image right now, at the precise moment you need to take a good, long, hard look at yourself and what you’ve become.
What are you thinking?! What are you doing?!
Flaunting gold and silver in the Office and pilfering from the People’s coffers to fund oligarchs and kleptocrats and want-to-be monarchs whose hypocritical sycophants want to keep them in power long past their allotted terms by claiming fraud and divine right to fight needless wars to line their mortal pockets, only bringing destruction and shame to your historical memory, your name.
I suppose I understand the Reflecting Pool’s reaction, actually. You should be ashamed of yourself! Don’t you remember anything?! And the tears shed by patriots that once had meaning?
How can you not remember the way everything ended for all those countries and nations that came before you, who were on your current trajectory of blind greed, fueled by the ignorance and labor of desperate humans in shackles of need? Until it was too late and the truth was out and naked in the streets.
And how that is the only thing that inevitably topples great nations, empires even, in the end, because they all come to an end— the starving and homeless with nothing left to lose, including their lives, as they’re already dying. There’s only centuries worth of data and words and graves to consult now. Come on!
Still, others’ history aside, how can you not remember where you came from?! And all the blood and bodies and dreams that were sacrificed in your name. For centuries now. To what? Go back to the beginning of human civilization as if we haven’t evolved from barbarians at all? To be ruled by a tyrant who will be dead soon anyway? For what? And what then?!
My Country, ‘tis of thee! Wake up and hear me sing! This is no time to sleep. Not when there’s too much to lose and nothing to gain. At the inverse of what it was like back then, when you came to be. No, now is not the time to invert the birth of “Don’t Tread on Me!”
Common Sense said “No King! No Tyranny!” and “In America, the law is king!” How can you not remember? Why do you refuse to recall? You must be in a coma. Or collapsed into illiteracy. There’s no other explanation for your passivity. To be ruled by an unruly group of the self-interested mad, who seem to have willfully lost your collective memory and historical documents for fleeting political fads. Everything you were determined to avoid!
You Declared yourself that “all men are created equal” and bemoaned “repeated injuries and usurpations” of a king that levied taxes without proper representation— a declaration enshrined in history’s very psyche that all citizens are endowed with “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
But we are not happy! And we are not free! Not the masses of us chained and shackled to monopolized corporate interests that are not in your interest either, not like those tied to what is quickly replacing you, a want-to-be monarchy. Citizens United is nothing more than aristocratic blasphemy! Against all citizens in the trenches being held ransom by a small group of thugs, and everything else you once outright shunned! There is proof!
“Give me liberty, or give me death!” you shouted, because as you know, it is not optional. Not now. Not ever. Not when there are no other options anyway. If you remember? Please, please say you remember. What is it all supposed to mean otherwise?
Alas, despite myself, despite your deafness, despite these uncertain times, and my bewildered state and elementary yet prescient and hypnotic rhymes, I wrote this message anyway because, well…
There’s always hope when you live in a country that was founded on nothing more than dreams.
Granted, most of those dreams were white colonial men’s dreams from the start.
Dreams that were more like demands than visions, though outsiders dubbed them mere hallucinations.
Dreams that spread far and wide, across continents and imaginations for centuries, and still do.
Dreams that sometimes permeate the air like the stench of every rotten corpse they were founded on and continue to feed on— that all promote the ever-elusive ideal of what it means to be an American, as we continue on “in order to form a more perfect Union” for the “land of the free, and the home of the brave” until the work is done, which may never come.
Dreams that are both a blessing and a curse when one claims ownership over them, as they do the dirt across their un-earned earth. Dreams that are always being chased …
I could keep going, you see, chasing these dreams, adding to these lines, unsure if you’ll receive this message or most of my unanswered pleas in time due to the simple fact that I know I’m not alone and never will be. Forever now in this experiment of human freedom and democracy. In fact, I know without a doubt that I’m in great company.
Because I also Have a Dream… one of the many you inspired… that one day… one day soon, you’ll wake up and remember and aspire to be all that you can be. Again. Please, please, wake up and remember your bittersweet history that still has a lot of years left of living work to do.
You are still young, with histories of life left!
All my hopes and dreams for the future of this ‘glorious cause’ are at your feet
–a concerned, desperate American from 2026
Today’s Dialogue
How are you feeling today? These Writing Prompts for USA’s 250th might help you sort through it.
SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM TO SEE TODAY’S WRITING PROMPT
© This work is not available for artificial intelligence (AI) training. All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton; Creighton’s Compositions LLC.
Community Notes
Here’s a poem I wrote that I thought you’d want to read. You can find the original here.
Liberty
The green-copper flames of freedom Beckoning all across the choppy seas To triumph over waves of burden To lay at her sandaled feet, to be The torch of the tired, weary masses Lit for all to read, to breathe The declarations of life first, not classes To bill the rights of all humanity The bold stance of honor, kindled grace Poised for all to civilly emulate, to meet The crown of connections to embrace The brave new world of evolving equality The engraved tablet of steel, chronically Nestled in broad arms of justified iron To remind us all of our living history The eternally ignited emancipating fire For thee, I burn boldly in statuette For thee, I live and roam freely For thee, I scale symbolic parapets For thee, I sing, sweet Liberty
