America was, and is, an ambitious dare

By AARON SMITH
Guest Columnist

Two hundred fifty years ago, a lawyer from Massachusetts sat down to write his wife a letter – and made a prediction that seems especially fitting this week.

The war was going badly. He had just put his name to what amounted to a death warrant. And in the middle of all of it, John Adams told Abigail that the day just past would be remembered forever – celebrated by “succeeding Generations” with “Pomp and Parade… Bonfires and Illuminations, from one End of this Continent to the other.”

He was describing our fireworks, two and a half centuries early, inside a cause most reasonable people expected to lose.

He wasn’t fooling himself about the price. He knew it would cost “Toil and Blood and Treasure.” And still, he wrote, “through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory.”

That may be the most American sentence ever written – the audacity of a man who could sit in the dark and describe the sunrise.

That audacity is exactly what we’ve misplaced lately. We treat the founding as a pile of documents to litigate, when it was first of all a nerve – an improbable, all-in bet by people who pledged “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor” on odds that should have buried them. The country began as a dare. And as we celebrate 250 years, I’ve grown convinced that the best thing we can do for the next 250 is the very thing that started it: be bold.

That cuts against the whole mood of the moment because ours is an age that has elevated cynicism. Despair is the house style now. It’s what the feeds reward, what the panels sell, what lands in the inbox begging for $25 before midnight because the end is near. Pessimism sounds sophisticated; hope sounds naïve. But turn it over and the truth shows that the cynic risks nothing and builds nothing. Doom is the one posture that asks nothing of us. Adams had every earthly reason for gloom and chose the bonfires anyway. Call it what it was: courage.

So what does that kind of nerve look like now, for the rest of us who will never sign a Declaration?

It looks, first, like showing up for the people around us. It’s bold to know the family two doors down in a society now built to keep us scrolling alone – to belong to something that meets in a room, to cross the street when staying in would be easier. Tocqueville marveled that where other people waited on the government, Americans simply rounded up their neighbors and got to work. It’s the same reflex that still encourages a bus driver and middle school students to remove weeds from an old downtown brick sidewalk in their free time. That is a kind of courage, and it is ours to keep or to lose.

It looks like building things meant to outlast us. In the 1870s, a still-young county of farmers spent a small fortune to raise a grand Second Empire courthouse over the Noblesville square – drawn by the architect who would go on to design the Indiana Statehouse, and, the day it opened, without equal in the state. It was a wildly ambitious thing for a place that size to build. And every generation since has made its own bold choice to keep it, to restore its clock tower and mansard roof, to guard it from the wrecking ball when trading it for something cheaper would always have been easier. We plant trees we will never sit under and lay brick for feet that can’t yet walk.

Adams had a word for it: Posterity. He was building it for us.

And at its boldest, it looks like investing in the generation coming up behind us – the new hire, the apprentice, the kid down the street with far more grit than guidance. It looks like coaching the team when you have no free time, teaching the class. Heck, even starting a business that hires that gritty kid. For my wife and me, it meant starting a family in the face of infertility after years of hoping, and the quiet heartbreak so many carry and too few admit out loud.

We should all refuse to be the generation that pulls the ladder up behind it because at its root, the most defiantly hopeful thing a person can do is stake a claim on someone or something that doesn’t yet exist.

Adams, through all his gloom, could see us – he was even a little off on the date, so sure we’d celebrate the second of July that he missed the fourth. But he saw the bonfires, and he was right. We will light them again this week, from one end of the continent to the other, exactly as he foresaw.

The only question worth asking on the Fourth is whether the Americans of 2276 will look back on us the way we look back on him – as people who, through their own gloom, kept the nerve.

Together, let’s raise up the next generation. Let’s light our bonfire. America was a dare from the very first day, and the boldest, most hopeful, most patriotic thing we can do with our turn is to go on daring.

Aaron Smith serves as the Vice President of the Noblesville Common Council.