One score and five years ago, America woke to a new morning. The bicentennial was a roaring national party, effusive, patriotic, and loud. It was a party held by the men and women who had limped joyfully out of World War II and then roared joylessly out of Vietnam, helicopter blades cutting the hot air over a barren jungle. It was a party held by people who had lived through racism and misogyny, religious judgment and conservative backlash, illiteracy and inequality. It was a celebration held by survivors who still believed there were better days ahead.

I remember the echo of that hoopla. Streamers in a forgotten drawer. Photos of parades. My grandmother in red, white, and blue. Me in a party hat next to a cake. Buttons and glasses and the flotsam of a party, the little things we kept to prove that the good times had happened.

To a degree, the people in those faded Kodachromes had little to celebrate. Stagflation was hitting. Unemployment was near 9%. Gas shortages plagued the nation, and wages remained flat. We were under Republican rule, and tax cuts were the lever of choice. But out in the hills, there was still work. The steel mills still rang in the Ohio Valley. Detroit still hummed. The docks in New York and Los Angeles were full. The little money people had was spent on good food, big cars, and trips to Myrtle Beach. It was an America well clear of the agrarian doldrums that had defined her before the war, and still living off the breakneck industrial expansion of the 1940s.

One score and five years ago, America woke to a new morning full of promise, joy, struggle, and growth. Sure, she hit bumps after that fateful year. They busted the unions, and the workers had nowhere to go. Cities were overrun with crack, and the countryside was overrun by uppers and opiates. The good jobs went away. Detroit hollowed out, falling from 1,350,000 souls in 1975 to 649,095 today. The Ohio Valley dwindled into dust. The cities on the plains, cities that once sent their best and brightest into politics, literature, science, and industry, began producing brains that left small college towns and melted into the coasts.

But back then, we thought we were post-history. Liberal ideals dragged the arc of justice forward. For a few decades after that morning, the morning after the celebration, we saw racial and sexual equality rise. We saw help given to those who needed it in an organized way. We were the envy of the world, a cultural behemoth that shared our ideals and our treasure in the hope that our soldiers, boys and girls born around that Fourth of July, would not have to walk into Auschwitz again or face the threat of nuclear annihilation. We were on the right track.

Because, as I said before, one score and five years ago, America woke to a new morning.

We are far from that today. Politics is toxic. The global discourse is populist and crude. Our media has been gutted. Truth comes from a million angles and a million mouths. Listening to the tumult, you would think we were living in an age of horrors, an age of coming destruction. And it matters that we keep thinking that, because the people who tell us we are all going to die, the tawdry Pandoras who keep building their own boxes, have a vested interest in preserving the last pieces of old institutional power. A man like Trump wants to keep his grifts alive. A man like Thiel wants to maintain his relevance and his fortune. A man like Musk wants to become the next Henry Ford, complete with the racism and antisemitism.

Those men want to keep their fortunes intact as America enters a new era, an era of empowerment and acceptance and growth and liberal ideals.

They know that when the revolution comes, they are the first to fall. Not in a hail of gunfire, but into irrelevance.

Because America always wakes to a new morning. Every morning. At night she limps along, desiccated, hurt, confused. Her people trust no one, not even their neighbors. Her mind rusts and shuts down. But in the morning she wakes, and the sun illuminates a library where a child who was suicidal, cuts still on her arms, finds a book about another trans person facing her struggle. Through the trees, over there, a ray of light hits a neighborhood where people still barbecue and celebrate together, where flags of all kinds fly. Through the skyscrapers you see a young mayor waking up and doing things for the people, not taking things from them. Through that window there, in a place that was once a booming mill town, a teacher wakes up and thinks about how he can help his students be better, think better, and avoid the traps of their elders.

The sun flashes off a laptop screen, a guitar, a work truck. A new toolbox catches the light and reflects onto the side of a house that a woman just built for her family. The immigrants who built it are amazed at the sunrise, fascinated by colors they once saw only over dusty, war-torn hills.

The morning illuminates the church that feeds the poor, the cafe that keeps students awake, and the restaurant that celebrates a foreign land while remaining firmly American. The morning shines off minarets and twinkles off a golden ark. It plays across the wings of a cardinal in flight, a bumblebee in a riot of lavender, and a dog barking at both.

The morning light catches the water, the waves, the lakes, the rivers. It even makes the Gowanus look blue again, a canal once so polluted that people joked its bottom was paved with discarded guns. It makes her forests look lush and verdant, her factories more beautiful, her people awake and alive.

The morning comes through your window and wakes you and everyone around you. Because a new morning comes every day. It is not attached to one person, one date, or one set of beliefs. It is attached to all of us, all around the world. And it is important to remember that we are in control of what we do with that morning. We decide which call we answer, which bells of true faith drown out the bells of fake piety, and which voices we heed: the voices that preach change and growth, or the voices that exist only to scare us, divide us, and break us.

William Seward wrote in 1885:

“There was always just enough virtue in this republic to save it; sometimes none to spare, but still enough to meet the emergency.”

We’re in an emergency right now, but if we work together, it will pass. One score and five years ago, America began to change, and the world we live in now would seem as strange to the people of 1976 as 1976 must have seemed to the people who celebrated America’s 150th birthday in 1926.

But there is still virtue left in her. The tank is not dry. The same forward drive that woke our ancestors a hundred years ago is still with us today. The same optimism, the same joy, the same will to work, build, and give.

Two days ago, America woke to a new morning. Yesterday, America woke to a new morning. Today, America woke to a new morning. Don’t let them force you to forget that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” because America has just woken to a new morning, and you are here to help her succeed.