Four hundred thousand people attended the July Fourth Bicentennial Boston Pops Esplanade Concert in 1976. I was one of them. It was a gorgeous summer night, a peaceful crowd enjoying the music and spirit of post-Watergate comity. A shared sense of patriotism and pride. Fifty years later it’s hard to replicate that sense of optimism.

Fewer than a third of Americans claim they feel excitement on this anniversary, with 59 percent saying that the country’s best years are behind us. Forty percent say our best years are yet to come. To quote a former First Lady, “hope is a choice.”

It’s all too easy to be consumed by outrage at our 47^th President. His Brobdingnagian corruption and lucrative self-dealing. His abuses of power and gratuitous bullying at home and abroad. His contempt for the Constitution he swore to uphold, and his repeated debasement of the office itself. His gob-smacking stupidity and habitual meanness.  His pathological narcissism and emotional dependence on the toadies with whom he surrounds himself. I don’t need to go on and on to make my point.

Even without focusing on him, this milestone national birthday invites a sobering reckoning, acknowledging our shortcomings along with successes.   It may not seem so in Boston’s medical mecca, but the United States has the poorest health outcomes of among high-income countries. Fifty-five countries have better infant mortality rates than we do. We have fallen behind Europe in responding to climate change. The United States is 30^th among the 33 countries in OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.  The list goes on.

Polls confirm that people have lost faith in institutions, their neighbors and themselves. A record 53 percent of Americans say that their fellow citizens have bad morals and ethics. That’s the highest rate of pessimism among the 25 countries that Pew Research surveyed.

Even our belief in democracy is challenged. While 81 percent of those 60 years and older embrace its importance, only half of Americans under 30 years old understand that democracy is key to our nation’s identity. Perhaps they just feel it’s not working for them. Or perhaps, taking it for granted, they just feel there’s no need to work to make it endure. 

Walter Isaacson claims these words from the Declaration of Independence constitute the “greatest sentence every written:” “ We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  No country since ancient Greece had so embraced the value of democracy, and it became a model for much of the world.

In penning that “greatest sentence,” however, the Founders were no stranger to hypocrisy. The sentence is full of contradictions, and the American story is the history of how we struggle to resolve those contradictions and form a “more perfect union.”  Our principles were always aspirational, and we have always been a work in progress, starting most obviously with the Constitution’s silence on the fate of some 700,000 enslaved people. (It’s worth remembering that the Fourth of July was for years a day for widespread slave auctions in the South.)

We shouldn’t lose perspective. You can tell from recent visitors to the United States for the FIFA games, how thrilled so many visitors are to be here. They are smitten with our hospitality, abundance, sense of freedom and the vibrant opportunities afforded by a democratic way of life.

Donald Trump may have hijacked the Congressionally authorized non-partisan America 250^th celebration, spreading his likeness all over town (including on the special edition U.S. passports), and turned his White House alternative Freedom250 national birthday party into a MAGA rally. But his tawdry events must not hollow out the fact that this nation is ours.

Our nation’s Founding Fathers left us a foundation of Enlightenment values: rule of law, equality under the law, balance of powers, freedoms of religion and press, individual liberty, consent of the governed. Upon those principles, generations have expanded – sometimes fitfully –  civil rights, economic opportunity, scientific knowledge, and protections for the vulnerable.  Is there more to do? Always.

The current administration has effectively spat on our founding principles, but we know what they are and, if we care about them, we can fight back. People around the world have admired and emulated our democratic experiment.   If the Founding Fathers returned today, would they be disappointed by what they saw?  Most Americans overwhelmingly agree with this negative assessment. But the Founders wrote the Constitution in anticipation of probable assaults on those principles then and now. We fought off the chains of British monarchy, we bled mightily to keep the union together, we built a mighty economic engine, we led world wars in pursuit of peace.

We are radically polarized today, with vastly different and often hyper-partisan opinions on the nature of the American Dream and how to achieve it. Too many politicians play to that polarization and outrage, and we need to do a better job of choosing our leaders, notwithstanding the gerrymandering that has our leaders picking their voters in too many states. We need to demand more of our news media, insisting they and their corporate owners not be cowed by the President’s impulses toward suppression and extortionate litigation.

Our country is patriotic but anxious, proud but pessimistic. But to accept today as the new normal would be a huge mistake. Our country is worth fighting for, and we should celebrate our 250^th birthday as a rededication to righting the ship of state. We should let ourselves enjoy the Boston Pops concert and fireworks. We should feel good about our country. Choose Hope – and act upon it.

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