250 years of arguing, and somehow still here
Let’s start with a vocabulary lesson, because the word is pulling double duty and both jobs matter.
Concord, the noun: agreement, harmony, a state of getting along. It comes from the Latin concordia — con, meaning together, and cor, meaning heart. Literally: hearts together.
Concord, the place: a little town in Massachusetts where, on April 19, 1775, a bunch of pissed-off farmers¹ traded musket fire with the most powerful army on earth and kicked off the American Revolution. The shot heard round the world.
Sit with that a second. The same word means both “harmony” and “the gunfight that started a war.” Which might be the most American thing I can think of. Our unity was born out of a brawl. We didn’t agree our way into a country — we argued, shouted, and shot our way into one, and we’ve been bickering at the dinner table ever since.
Here’s the part nobody running for office wants you to internalize: that’s not a bug. That’s the whole damn point.
The founders didn’t build a machine for agreement. They built one for disagreement — a system that assumed people would want wildly different things and went out of its way to make room for all of it. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Read that last part again. The pursuit of happiness. Not the government’s version of it. Not mine. Yours. Whatever the hell that looks like for you.
For you, happiness might be a farm, four kids, and a church you never miss. For your neighbor, it might be a downtown loft, a dog instead of kids, and brunch on Sunday instead of a pew. For the guy down the street, it might be something neither of you would pick in a million years. Good. That’s the whole damn point. The promise was never that we’d all want the same life. It’s that every single one of us gets to chase our own version of it, and nobody gets to stop us.
And look at what that produced. This country is a ridiculous, improbable mashup — descendants of people who arrived in chains, in steerage, in covered wagons, and on a student visa last Tuesday. Fifty states that behave like fifty stubborn science experiments. A Vermonter and a Texan can’t even agree on what counts as barbecue². And somehow, all of us, this wildly mismatched crowd — we’re Americans. That isn’t something to paper over or apologize for. That’s something to be damn proud of.
So why does it feel like we hate each other?
Because somewhere along the way, the politicians figured out a trick. Turns out it’s really hard to get somebody to vote for you, and stupidly easy to get them to vote against the other guy. Fear is cheaper than hope. Hatred is more reliable than inspiration. So both parties³ built an entire industry on it. They don’t need you to love them. They just need you scared shitless of the other team.
And here’s the con at the center of it — the thing I need you to actually hear: the politician screaming that your neighbor is the enemy is not on your side. Your neighbor is not the enemy. Your neighbor mows their lawn, pays their taxes (no matter how much we hate it), yells at the same referees, and wants to be left alone to live their life — exactly like you. They just fill in a different bubble on a ballot. That’s it. That’s the whole terrifying difference they’ve spent billions convincing you to hate them over.
The parties want you to believe half the country is evil. It’s a lie, and it’s a goddamn profitable one.⁴
Want proof this beautiful mess still works despite all of it? American companies have been the best investment on the planet this century, and it isn’t close. That doesn’t happen in a country that’s actually broken. It happens because a free people — allowed to argue, build, fail, and try again — turn out to be the most powerful engine the world has ever built. The chaos isn’t the flaw in the system. The chaos is the system.⁵
So what’s our job in all this? Simpler than the news makes it sound. Live your life as well as you possibly can. Be the kind of person, neighbor, and citizen you’d want more of in the world. And then — here’s the radical part — trust that the rest of the country is watching, and hope like hell they want a little of what you’ve got. You don’t change a nation by winning an argument on the internet. You change it by living a life somebody would want to copy. Lead by example. Then give your fellow Americans the same grace to do the same, in their own way, chasing their own happiness.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, a handful of farmers in Concord decided that a hard, uncertain, argumentative freedom beat a comfortable, orderly cage. They were right. We are the improbable result — over 300 million people who agree on damn near nothing and still, against every reasonable odd, share one identity worth being grateful for.
We don’t have to agree. We never did. We just have to remember who’s actually pointing the gun. It isn’t the person across the aisle. It’s the ones on stage getting rich by aiming us at each other.
So this year, be grateful. For all its noise and all its mess, there has never been a luckier place to call home. Don’t be an asshole; hug your neighbor, because the one thing we all have in common is vastly more important than the things we don’t. We are what makes America great.
Happy 250th, America. You chaotic, argumentative, miraculous experiment. Here’s to 250 more.⁶
Make Life Your Beach, and keep America great. I love all of you, even if we don’t agree.
¹ “Pissed-off” is, I believe, the correct historical term.
² I’ll let Texas take the W here.
³ Yes, both. If you just felt the urge to explain why the other side is the real problem — congratulations, you’re the target market.
⁴ Outrage is the highest-margin product in America. Nobody moves more of it than a politician ninety days before an election.
⁵ I promised myself exactly one paragraph of finance talk. Look at me. Growing as a person.
⁶ Assuming we don’t argue ourselves into a divorce first. We won’t. We’re all talk (hopefully).
Resources
How To Avoid The Middle Class Tax Bomb
Make Life Your Beach
Memento Mori
Write Your Own Eulogy