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.
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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.
