A Legacy Worth Celebrating? Reflecting on 250 Years of the American Experiment | Frankly 149

**Nate Hagens** (0:00)
Good morning. Today's piece is a wide boundary look at the United States on its 250th birthday. And right now, with the political temperature where it is, both domestically and internationally, I suspect, I know, a reflection like this one is likely to trip a lot of people's gut reactions about the moral status of the United States. In fact, some of you may already be sorting me into for America or against her. So here's my ask with this pre-intro intro. As you listen to this video, please suspend those beliefs for just a moment and situate this conversation about one of the world's current superpowers in the broader context of our cultural future and our shared more than human predicament. I am sure there will be at least a few statements in this video that you disagree with, but I hope the larger conversation that I'm trying to start this holiday weekend, but these past four years carries through and that you also see the value in this despite any tensions that might arise. I love this country and I love the wider world, and that is exactly why I am willing to look at it, honestly. Here's the frankly.
It is the 4th of July, and if you live in the USA, like I do, somewhere near you, there is probably a cookout. Burgers on the grill, a cooler of cold beer, kids running around with sparklers, a flag, an American flag on the porch. This weekend, the nighttime sky over almost every town in this country will fill with fireworks for a 250-year birthday milestone. I love this country. I was born here. I have benefited from the largesse, the beauty, the opportunities, and the stability it has provided. But today, as I regularly do on this channel, I want to take a wide boundary view of the United States of America, knowing that the wide boundary view of a birthday party is not always the toast that everyone wants to hear. But I deeply care about the future of this nation and the broader world. And so I feel that these hard truths are something we need to shine a light on. So happy birthday, USA. Let's talk about today's party. 250 candles, and we congratulate ourselves on our long history. China has been China for 5,000 years. Rome ran for 1,000. We're 250, a toddler who just learned to walk and is confident he invented it.
There is an age when a birthday stops being about the cake. When you're little, it's all presents and candles and how big you got the little pen marks climbing the bathroom door.
And then looking back, you realize that one year not realizing it at the time, it turns into something else. It starts being about whether you grew up and what kind of adult you turned into.
For a nation, maybe 250 is that age. So that's the real reflection I have in mind for today. Not how big did we get, but did we grow up? Have we fulfilled our potential to embody and assert that all people possess unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Or did that somehow morph to degrading the web of life, convenience, and the pursuit of dopamine?
Today, there is laughter and novelty and excitement, but there is also a cloud over our party. Our feel-good conversations largely ignore the main things that have made our celebration possible.
The grill is hydrocarbons. The lighter fluid, the propane, the charcoal, all of it. Ancient sunlight. The burgers came in on a diesel truck.
The fireworks that go up tonight, made from gunpowder and burst in colors, made from metals somebody mined and shipped across an ocean. Even the cake, if you follow it all the way back, is pretty much made from oil. We are an energy-blind culture, though maybe the scramble now that's playing out over the world's last cheap hydrocarbons is starting to wake some people up. We still tell ourselves that our abundance came from our freedom and our work ethic and our genius. And yes, we did work hard and built really awesome things. But mostly, we happen to be sitting on the largest natural inheritance any human peoples ever stumbled onto. And that fact is still missing from our barbecue conversations. The United States has burned more oil and fossil fuels than any country in history. And we measure that in muscle power. A single barrel of oil holds something like five years of human labor, which means we've had hundreds of billions of invisible workers laboring on our behalf. The insidious truth is that over our 250 years, we went from real human slaves to fossil ones. The stories of freedom for all and the American dream underneath all the money and the technology was not too indirectly an accident of geology. The cake was always mostly made of oil.