The United States of America is many things: horrific and magnificent, good and evil, promising and cursed, as it nears its quarter millennium mark.
It is a truck that has driven into a ditch, a program that has been hacked. But it is also a thousand things at once.
The US is the masked ICE agent who shot Renee Good, but also Good herself and the immigrants she stood for.
It is the streets of Minneapolis and their Dakota and Ojibwe Indigenous past, present, and future.
Before 1865, the US was slaveowners, but also the enslaved and the abolitionists.
It is the KKK and the ACLU, the NAACP, right-to-life terrorists, and Planned Parenthood security guards.
It is Chevron and Exxon, yet also the Sierra Club, founded in 1892, and thousands of environmental and climate groups today.
The US is its contradictions and conflicts.
It is 340 million people, including nearly 2 million prisoners—a population larger than 12 US states, making prison almost a 51st state with no representation.
It is a country where guns outnumber people, yet it produced nonviolent resistance's most lyrical advocate, Martin Luther King Jr., who was shot on a motel balcony in Memphis.
King had come out to greet jazz musician Ben Branch, whose rendition of "Precious Lord" he loved.
The US gave the world jazz, blue jeans, the atom bomb, and the birth control pill—its best and worst people and products.
At its heart, the US has always been an experiment, an argument, a question with countless answers.
It was never and will never be one thing, even with one federal government that is currently a catastrophic crime scene.
It is tempting to make the current White House a metaphor for the country.
One third of the people's house built under Roosevelt has been wrecked; its rose garden built by Jacqueline Kennedy has been paved over; its lawn recently covered with a glitzy Thunderdome arena for toxic masculinity.
But he is not the country.
The US is the 77 million adults who voted for him, the 75 million who voted for Harris, and the nearly 90 million who didn't vote.
It is also children, noncitizens, prisoners, and former prisoners not part of that voting population.
It is the land itself: from maple and birch forests of the northeast to Alaska's glaciers to Hawaii's tropical rainforests, with prairie, swamp, and desert in between.
That land existed for billions of years before 1776 and will remain long after the US ceases to exist—as it must, someday, as must the human race.
The US is the desert tortoises that have ambled through the Mojave for 60 million years and the people who created protected lands for their survival.
But the question at hand is the US at 250 and its possible futures.
One certainty: it will become a non-white majority country in a couple of decades, and nothing can stop that.
Earlier this year, I was struck by valiant, idealistic young people who came into the spotlight.
Renee Good, 37, shot on January 7, and Alex Pretti, also 37, shot on January 24, faced death for their beliefs.
But another young person came into power on New Year's Day 2026: Zohran Mamdani, age 34.
He beat the odds and Andrew Cuomo's money to become New York City's first Muslim mayor, speaking up for marginalized populations.
On February 8, despite rightwing outcries, Bad Bunny, 32, took the Super Bowl stage with a halftime show celebrating Puerto Rico in Spanish—a generous, joyous, multilingual America where anyone can dance with anyone.
Later that month, Oakland's Alysa Liu, daughter of a Chinese refugee, won figure-skating gold at the Olympics with a performance of freedom and joy.
She had dropped out, refusing to be controlled, then returned on her own terms.
As she skated out, she shouted, "That's what I'm fucking talking about," laughing joyously.
These were not typical Americans, but like the 8 million who showed up for the No Kings demonstration on March 28, they were Americans.
No Kings was unprecedented in size and scope, taking place in every congressional district.
The US is a perpetual question; these lives and performances were demonstrations of answers some have given and cheered.
I do not believe Trump will destroy the US, but he has badly broken it. What comes after must include consequences for criminals and a massive clean-up operation.
There will be no return to how things were; we must fix what allowed this destruction.
In the end, I return to Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg: "It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work ...
that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
That is an ideal never yet realized, yet a moral north toward which this country at its best has been pointing for 250 years.
