Young people on the meaning of America at 250

This year, America turns 250 years old. This birthday asks us to hold two truths at once: America is a great nation and she also needs some work to become even better. 

The country is certainly not the one imagined by America’s founders, nor the one perfected by any generation since then. It was built with a foundation of contradictions. Men who owned slaves declared liberty for themselves, promising equality to the people in a nation that took land by force. Those wounds are real. Pretending otherwise dishonors the people who suffered them. 

URL Media, together with partners Big Brothers Big Sisters and Jersey Cares, asked dozens of young people to talk about what is meaningful for them about this country as well as what they hope will improve about it in the future. 

The American story has never been about perfection.

It’s about how we struggle to get closer to it. Every generation or so, young people look at the gap between the nation’s ideals on paper and the reality in the streets and decide to help close that gap a little. They take inspiration from some of the nation’s greatest heroes. Abolitionists, suffragists, civil rights marchers, and immigrants certainly didn’t inherit a finished country. 

They inherited an unfinished argument. Then they kept arguing. 

So what does it mean to be American now? And how can this great nation serve its young people? 

Today’s young people stand in the same tradition of the generations before them. Their hopes for the nation are the latest chapter in the quintessentially American tradition of demanding that America lives up to its own words. 

A flawed nation can still be a great one, not despite its flaws but because it chooses to face up to them and fix them. 

The country is still becoming. 

And the young people got next. 

Listen to what they have to say. 

This project is presented in partnership with: the New Jersey Department of Human Services and the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

the New Jersey Department of Human Services and the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Remember, You Matter. Support is available 24/7. Text, Call, or Chat 988 or visit Chat988Lifeline.org.

MORE FROM THE URL MEDIA NETWORK 

● The semiquincentennial of second sight: Black America’s X-ray vision for democracy URL Media 

● America 250: A republic built on Native land – Native News Online ● ‘I’m happy for the country’: Wong Kim Art descendant reacts – AsAm News ● Why we’re building a Black oral history archive – Capital B 

● We shouldn’t need a fictional president to save Puerto Rico – Latina Media Co

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