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.
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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.
