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We Have Been Here Before

Fifty years ago, I stood on Fisherman's Wharf and watched fireworks light up the San Francisco sky. I was a graduate student at Berkeley, newly arrived from India. America was turning 200.

The country I had joined was tired. The Vietnam War had just ended. A president had just resigned. Gas lines were still a fresh memory. Prices were rising fast, and jobs were hard to find. If you had stopped people on the street that summer and asked if they felt hopeful, many would have said no.

And yet, that night, none of it mattered. Tall ships sailed into New York Harbor. Small towns held parades. Neighbors who disagreed about everything else stood on the same sidewalk and watched the same sky light up. I did not know yet what kind of country I had joined. But I learned something that summer: America does not wait to feel certain before it shows up.

Now we turn 250. The worries have new names. The weariness feels familiar. But history has a lesson for us, if we are willing to hear it: the years that felt most uncertain were never years when America stood still. They were years when ordinary people, tired as they were, chose to show up anyway — for each other, for their neighbors, for the simple joy of watching the sky light up together.

That is the America I fell in love with fifty years ago on that wharf. It is the same America I see in front of me today.

Fifty years ago, I was a guest at the party. Today, I am family. Happy 250th, America.

— Kam Shenai