Happy birthday, America

Editor's note: Zouhary is a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, based in Toledo. Soon we will celebrate with parades, music and fireworks. We will add this happy noise to an already noisy time in our country's history. Over recent years, political and ideological divides have intensified. We see symptoms of this polarization across our country, and tension within, and between, our three branches of government. We have had difficult times before in our history. America has survived because we believed in the Constitution's purpose and its promise. Do not be discouraged by the politics of today. Rather, I suggest you be encouraged by understanding American history. And so, I borrow from a recent article about America's optimism. At our founding, the Revolution could have gone wrong and taken a different path. Instead, Washington's victory was followed by the genius generation of the Founders and Framers. These were tough-minded, pragmatic men. Imperfect, yes, but they fought and won a war against the greatest power on Earth. And they were also brilliant political thinkers — they built a framework of government that has lasted 249 years. Their most enduring legacy was an ideology of individual freedoms which even our hectic politics of today cannot erase. Our Civil War could have resulted in nothing more than a brutal powerplay with the North and West devouring the South. That didn't happen because Abraham Lincoln gave the War a profound moral dimension. The "last best hope," he insisted, was at stake. Lincoln defined our exceptionalism. He believed that, as a nation, we could rise above our troubled history and put in practice the principle of equality expressed in our Declaration of Independence. Later, when the Great Depression shook our way of life to its very foundation, Franklin Roosevelt rejected "fear itself" and restored faith in the representative democracy. America's "greatest generation" stood tall during World War II. Enter a magnificently eloquent preacher, who practiced nonviolence, and taught forgiveness. As anyone who has read the Letter from Birmingham Jail can tell you, Martin Luther King, Jr. was part of American exceptionalism. When the Cold War appeared eternally deadlocked, Ronald Reagan could conceive of only a single outcome: "we win, they lose." We were that "Shining City on a Hill" inspired by his description of a call for Americans to believe in themselves — a renewal of optimism. Our history is owned by each of us. America is both fortunate and exceptional. Most of our problems stem from abundance — not scarcity. And many stories of American patriotism have been fueled by immigrants. As historian Oscar Handlin famously said, "Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history." Americans are restless, because we always live on the edge of a frontier, and are always tempted by the siren song of the future. We are in a word, unsettled — an honorable condition. And with today's polarization, we are perhaps more unsettled now than in our recent past. Even still, we must remember that our shared history has been marked by trying times — when honorable citizens with significant disagreements found common ground to move us forward. One early example is Jefferson and Adams. Our history is not all virtuous. Still, we press on. We excel. We respect the Rule of Law. Learn from our shared history, embrace it, and use it. Engage in civil debate with family and friends of different opinions and viewpoints, using reason and evidence. Be open to new ideas. Listen —don't shout. As John Kennedy promoted — "ask what you can do for your country"— the longest running democracy in the history of civilization. We must work at it, as Ben Franklin warned — "A Republic, if you can keep it." We are bound together by our Constitution. Go now, reach across the divide, and wave the flag together.