Sustainability of Freedom: The 250th Summer

Two hundred and fifty summers. Say it out loud. Let the number sit on your tongue like sparkler smoke as we reflect on the sustainability of freedom.

This July, America turned 250. And if you stood outside on the Fourth – sulfur drifting over the cul-de-sac, charcoal and cut watermelon on the air, a flag somewhere snapping like a sail – you felt something older than the cookout. A low hum underneath the fireworks. Gratitude, maybe. Or its ghost.

Because here is what I keep noticing: we treat freedom like weather. Something that simply happens to us. We wake up inside it the way we wake up inside a Tuesday – assumed, unremarkable, invisible. We only look up when the sky changes.

But freedom is not weather.

Freedom is a garden.

“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.”
– Thomas Paine

Paine wrote that while the revolution was still a long-shot gamble – before the outcome was a birthday, back when it was only a bet. He understood something we keep forgetting on the far side of 250 years: nothing living sustains itself. Not a forest. Not a body. Not a republic. Everything alive is either being tended or quietly going to seed.

And this is where the science turns into something like wonder. Gratitude – real gratitude, the kind you feel in your chest and not just your calendar – is not a mood. It is maintenance. Researchers have watched it work: a few honest minutes of thanks and the brain’s stress chemistry begins to ease, sleep deepens, the heart settles into a steadier rhythm. The body of a grateful person is measurably different from the body of a person merely going through the motions. Thanks, it turns out, is a verb. Something you do that changes the one doing it.

Freedom works the same way.

A freedom you never use is a muscle you never move. It doesn’t vanish overnight. It softens. It forgets its own strength. Rights, like rivers, keep their shape by moving. This is the heart of everything I write under SustainUSphere: sustainability was never only about the planet. It is about the people standing on it – and about the fragile, hard-won conditions that let those people speak, gather, worship, wander, vote, and begin again. You cannot sustain a freedom you never touch. Not by fireworks. Not by nostalgia. Not by a flag pin.

By use.

“The function of freedom is to free someone else.”
– Toni Morrison

So here is your snapshot for the 250th summer – one small thing, and let the season carry it:

This week, spend one freedom on purpose. Not all of them. One. Say the true thing out loud. Read the book somebody, somewhere, didn’t want read. Write the letter to the editor. Check your voter registration at the kitchen table while the coffee is still hot. Gather your people on the porch just because you can. And while you do it – this is the part that matters – name it: This is a freedom. Someone paid for this. I am keeping it alive right now.

Gratitude changes the body that practices it. Use changes the freedom that receives it. Do both at once and something quietly compounds – in you, and in the country you’re standing in.

Two hundred and fifty years is not a finish line. It is a relay, and the baton is warm from other hands.

The fireworks fade. The freedom shouldn’t.

It is already yours.

The only question left is whether you’ll use it.