I was not born in this country. I came to the United States from the Philippines as a young man entering the University of Michigan, drawn by the promise that this place has always made to the world: who you were when you arrived is not the limit of who you can become. That identity here is not inherited but chosen. That the threshold is always, in some essential American way, open.
On July 4, 2026, the United States turns 250 years old. America250 describes this milestone as “an opportunity to pause and reflect on our nation’s past, honor the contributions of all Americans, and look ahead toward the future we want to create for the next generation and beyond.” It is, in the most literal sense, a Janus moment, as in the ancient Roman god of beginning, endings and transitions. A nation turning its two faces simultaneously toward what it has been and what it intends to become.
I am writing this from New Hope, Pennsylvania, not that far from Philadelphia, the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed, where American identity was first formally imagined, and where I have spent more of my life than any other place on earth. Philadelphia is one of the primary hosts for America250 federal events this year. Afterall, it is the city where it all started. Where 56 people looked honestly at what they were living under and committed, with everything they had, to something different.
That is not a historical footnote but the most consequential act of The Janus Plan’s (my forthcoming book’s) Step 2 — Frame the Future — in the history of this country.
The Declaration as a Janus Document
Read the Declaration of Independence again with fresh eyes and you will find something remarkable. It begins with an honest accounting of the past ahead of looking to a vision for the future.
The document spends more than half its length cataloguing, with specific, unflinching detail, what had actually happened. What the King had done. What the colonies had endured. What had been tried and failed. What the year, and the decade, had tried to teach them. Only after that honest backward examination does it arrive at the forward commitment: we hold these truths to be self-evident, and we are building something new from what this history has revealed.
Jefferson and his colleagues did not skip The Janus Plan’s Step 1 — Ponder the Past. They started there.
That is the sequence the six-step Janus Plan is built on. You cannot design a meaningful future without first taking an honest look at your actual past. The founders understood this instinctively. They did not declare independence out of wishful thinking. They declared it out of honest reckoning.
What Two Hundred and Fifty Years Have Been Trying to Teach Us
A 250th anniversary is an invitation to not only celebrate but to do the harder and more consequential work of honest examination: what did the first 250 years actually try to teach this country?
Not a highlight reel. Not a catalog of grievances. An honest accounting of what these years revealed about what works, what does not, what the nation has been carrying forward out of inertia rather than intention, and what it might be ready, finally, to address.
Every individual who has worked through Step 1 of The Janus Plan knows how difficult this is. It is far easier to set goals for next year than to look honestly at what last year was trying to teach you. It is far easier to declare a new beginning than to honestly complete the chapter you are still living inside. Nations, it turns out, are no different.
The most patriotic thing an American can do this July 4 is not to celebrate uncritically. It is to do what the founders did: look honestly at what is, before declaring what should be.
The Promise That Brought Me Here
I came to this country because of what it promised and the ideals it keeps reaching toward. The gap between the promise and the reality is not a reason to abandon the promise but to take it more seriously.
America at 250 is a country that has never fully been what it declared itself to be on July 4, 1776. It has also never stopped trying. That tension between the ideal and the actual, between the declaration and the delivery, is not a failure of the American project. It is the American project. The ongoing, imperfect, necessary work of honest examination followed by renewed commitment.
That is the Janus practice. Not performed once in 1776 and then completed. Performed again and again. At 100 years, at 200 years, at 250, and well into the future, by people willing to look at what actually is before they commit to what should be.
I am one of 350 million people living inside this ongoing experiment. I did not arrive here by accident of birth. I arrived by choice. Which means every July 4 is, for me, a personally felt renewal of a commitment I made deliberately.
This year more than any other, I am sitting with what that commitment means.
What to Do with This Particular July 4
Here is my invitation for the 250th before the fireworks, parade, cookout and celebration that this anniversary genuinely deserves. Find ten minutes. Sit somewhere quiet. And ask the Janus questions. Not just about your own year, but about the country.
- What has America been trying to teach us in these 250 years that we have not yet fully learned?
- What is working, genuinely working, that we want to build on?
- What are we carrying forward into the next 250 years that no longer belongs?
- What would it look like to step into the next chapter of this country not with wishful thinking but with honest intention?
You don’t have to agree with anyone about the answers. The value is in asking the questions honestly which is what Jefferson and his colleagues did, and what every generation since has been called to do in their own time. This is ours.
That is the invitation. It belongs to you. It belongs to this country. And it belongs to this particular July, when two hundred and fifty years of looking backward and forward simultaneously arrive at a single day worth honoring with the honesty it deserves.
Happy birthday, America. I am glad I came.