America is the best nation in the world, producing countless famous people and great deeds, making world-leading innovations, producing many of the world’s most influential artists, entrepreneurs and leaders, containing an expansive set of cultures — and it’s all backed by assurances of personal freedom and the ability to be your best self.

America is the worst nation in the world, built on a history of crimes against humanity: we violently executed Manifest Destiny, forced women and children to walk the Trail of Tears, brought Nazis into the fold with Operation Paperclip and performed the Tuskegee syphilis study — to say nothing of fighting an entire war with ourselves over whether it was okay to keep other people in slavery.

America, frankly, is complicated — and on her 250th birthday, that’s okay. Our nation is allowed to be both great and terrible, filled with both wonders and curses. From sea to shining sea encompasses it all: the good and the bad. We contain incredible philanthropists and horrific serial killers…and a vast sea of humanity in between.

As we stand at the precipice of a new age, threatening renewed crisis and strife, we see before our nation times of great struggle. The red dawn rises, and with it comes questions of truth, and reality, and the American Way. AI and campaigns of misinformation threaten to erase our conceptions of all three, rewriting our future to resemble our past — a time of kings and peasants, where the vast majority were simply told what was true, instead of being allowed to discover it for themselves.

Looming beyond the challenges of our digital present lies a future in crisis, where the dramatic escalations of climate disasters challenge us to rewrite our culture — or perish, as thousands already are due to increasingly extreme conditions the world over.

And yet, amidst it all — the rapid shifts in society and the values we hold dear; technological transformations; the very changing of the world we live in; and more — amidst it all, there remains the hope of a better future for us and those who come after.

Hope, we would argue, is the most American of values. Hope is what guided a rat-pack, rag-tag coalition of rebels, fighting tooth and nail against one of the most powerful empires the world had ever seen. Hope allowed a fledgling country to dare to dream beyond their own borders, slowly expanding a frontier made up of the dreams of tens of thousands who hitched their wagons and their prayers and headed west. Hope allowed us to see the best in people the world over, adding their strengths to our own and forging a superpower in the wake of World War II, ushering in a time of relative global peace so prosperous it is referred to as Pax Americana.

Hope endures. Hope is our most iconic legacy: the gift we brought to the world, and the value we most need to remember as we look ahead, past our nation’s 250th birthday.

And yet, there is always that nagging doubt. Abraham Lincoln, in his inaugural address in 1861, sought “the better angels of our nature.” A little over a month later, the nation would be in the Civil War. Four years later, nearly to the day, John Wilkes Booth shot him in the head after the conclusion of one of the most horrific conflicts in the modern era.

Where were our “better angels?” Hope, perhaps, is fleeting.

But, still, we hope anyway. And we go on. We look to a better tomorrow, and we go on.

For this July 4th, this 250th year of the United States of America, we challenge our readers to remember the light of America — the promise and the hope, against centuries of evidence to the contrary, that it is possible to build a nation where the average person is cherished, protected and free to live the life they choose.

This is a tremendous reality, and one which is so often taken for granted. This reality is not divinely guaranteed to be eternal: it is only through the care and effort of America’s citizens that her values can be upheld.

All of us, ultimately, are responsible for the future of these United States of America. It is our communities, our cultures and our fierce love of freedom that are woven together into the fabric of a nation. We may argue and insult. We may curse and oppose. But we are, all of us, still Americans — products of that legacy of hope.

We dare not prognosticate where we might be 250 years from now. History, with its tumultuous waves, all but guarantees that the future will take a shape that none now can truly foresee.

What does lie within our control, however, is how we manage our present while building our future. Our American ideals have accomplished much: heed them. Pursue truth. Seek justice. Desire equality. Acquire knowledge. Obtain wisdom.

Perhaps most importantly, understand that with your own freedom must also come the freedom of others.

God Bless America.