When a CBS Face the Nation news anchor asked two Medal of Honor recipients “What makes you feel optimistic?” about this time in the American experience, the following is how they responded:
Lt. Col. WILLIAM SWENSON (Ret): Well, ultimately, because we're in Washington, D.C., and everything revolves around politics, we have to remember that politics aren't everything. American lives continue on. Children are born, children go to school. Lives are achieved. Dreams are achieved. This country is a great place. It's not politics. It's not just what's the news bites coming off of media. Ultimately, we continue forward as a country, continually imperfect, continually evolving forward, always trying to achieve a more perfect union. That's what's important to remember, what we can achieve aspirationally. No other place in history, time or on this planet have we ever gotten to where we are today. We need to be proud of that, and we need to remember that is what we stay focused on, what we can be.
Command Sergeant Major MATT WILLIAMS (Ret): You know, I agree with Will. I think it's so important to remember who we are as a country, and take an opportunity to celebrate that, and think about all the challenges that we've overcome, how far we've actually come. If you frame it that way, thinking very deeply about our trials and tribulations from beginning to today, we've made tremendous strides. Our country is a global superpower. Our economy is doing well. All those things are great. And take politics out of this whole conversation. Just talk about our communities that we live in, the people that you surround yourself with, and your families, and the opportunity to be free and choose what school you go to, and where you want to live and do what you want to do, and what career path you go down or don't. There's so much to be positive about. And I think the opportunity to celebrate America's 250th birthday over the course of this next year is amazing. There's so many great places to visit. The National Mall is going to be full of Americana... celebrating ourselves, which I think we should take the time to do. Something we're very passionate about at the National Medal of Honor Museum in Arlington, Texas, is a phenomenal beacon that tells the story of the Medal and what it represents. I would challenge people to go there and celebrate our history as well. There's so many great things to do and great things to visit and when you do, celebrate our country, actually celebrate it. Be grateful for what you've got and the opportunity that was provided for you. If you do that, I don't see how you can't be optimistic about our future.
by Matt Vespa on X on May 25, 2026
How should we think about the American Revolution on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence? The American revolutionaries can help us answer this question.
John Adams, one of the chief revolutionaries, looking back more than four decades after the Declaration of Independence, recorded a memorable judgment on the Revolution in which he played such a central part. Adams lived through all the great events of the Revolution beginning well before and continuing long after July 4, 1776: the Boston Tea Party, the convening of the First Continental Congress, Paul Revere’s Ride, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, Washington’s crossing of the Delaware, the winter at Valley Forge, and the Battle of Yorktown. He understood that all the colorful circumstances, the risky and fateful choices, the acts of daring and heroism would be long remembered and would deserve and need serious study.
But Adams also thought that we couldn’t understand the heroic deeds of the American Revolution—we couldn’t recognize their most essential lesson for us—without understanding the reason they were undertaken. As he wrote to Hezekiah Niles on February 13, 1818, the American Revolution took place “in the Minds and Hearts of the People”—a “radical Change in the Principles, Opinions Sentiments and Affection of the People,” he wrote, “was the real American Revolution.”
The record of this revolution in Americans’ hearts and minds is one of our great national treasures. It provides precious knowledge of the American Revolution to all future times and all peoples everywhere, but especially to what America’s Founders called “ourselves and our Posterity.” It is the eloquent record of the conception and articulation of the American idea of political freedom in pamphlets, petitions, state papers, letters, sermons, constitutions, resolves, bills and declarations of rights, memoirs, diaries, journals, treaties, and speeches—mostly in a compressed period in the 1760s and 1770s—in which a revolutionary generation learned to think and act like the Americans they were becoming.
This “real American Revolution,” as Adams called it, culminated in the Declaration of Independence—an expression of what Thomas Jefferson called “the American Mind.” All of the revolutionary actions and documents leading to the Declaration express one dimension or another of the American idea of political freedom. Returning to them again and again is a way by which succeeding generations of Americans can continue to experience the American Revolution for themselves.
This experience should not be seen as merely historical. To experience the real American Revolution, and not just the record of it, is to experience the idea of political freedom becoming active in our hearts, minds, and lives. It is to experience being free—not as an unhinged Supreme Court Justice explained freedom in 1992, writing that freedom means being able to “define [our] own concept of existence,” but in the active exercise of the capacities required for self-government. It is an experience that requires, as the Virginia Declaration of Rights proclaimed in 1776, “a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and [a] frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.”
The revolutionary and founding generations did their heroic part in bequeathing to us this legacy of freedom. So abundant is this gift that to live up to it is the most fulfilling thing we can do. It is to confirm with our lives what George Washington declared in his First Inaugural Address, “that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness.” The daily activity of a free people is the “pursuit of Happiness,” the activity of being good sons and daughters, good parents, neighbors, secretaries, teachers, artists, farmers, plumbers, mechanics, business owners, and citizens. As Benjamin Franklin’s homely Poor Richard put it: “Pitch upon that course of life which is most excellent, and Custom will make it the most delightful.”
In this daily American “rising to equality,” as Abraham Lincoln described it, the idea of political freedom so richly articulated by the American revolutionaries informs and elevates our lives, our communities, our institutions, and all we do and aspire to do. Those who undertook the American Revolution intended for it to honor human nature. Nothing can do more honor to human nature or greater good to ourselves, our country, and our world than living up to that Revolution.
by Christopher Flannery at imprimis.hillsdale.edu, June/July 2026 | Volume 55, Issue 6/7
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