A reflection on our Semiquincentennial, the noise that’s trying to drown out our goodness, and the deeper emergency waiting on the other side of our attention.
Two hundred and fifty years. That’s a long time for a nation to keep arguing with itself about who it wants to be. Today, on this Fourth of July, I want to hold two truths in the same hand, the way a conguero holds a steady tumbao under a song that keeps threatening to fall apart: this country is in real trouble, and this country is still, stubbornly, full of good people who refuse to let it stay that way.
The Revolution Bernie Is Asking About
Senator Bernie Sanders posted a video this week asking a question a lot of us have been carrying quietly: “Is the political revolution we’ve been fighting for here?” He points to the organizing wins bubbling up in Colorado and elsewhere, the grassroots campaigns sprouting in places nobody was watching, as evidence that something is shifting under the surface. I don’t share that video just to amplify Bernie. I share it because the question itself is the point. A revolution isn’t a single election or a single leader. It’s the slow, cumulative decision of ordinary people to stop looking away.
That question matters more on our 250th birthday than on any ordinary July 4th, because right now the loudest voices in the room are not the ones organizing food pantries or knocking on doors. They’re the ones counting the money.
What’s Actually Happening Behind the Fireworks
I’m not going to pretend the last few months haven’t been ugly, because pretending is its own kind of dishonesty, and dishonesty is not something Adaptive Resiliency can afford.
ICE detention has become a wealth machine. Independent watchdogs and congressional hearings have laid out the numbers plainly. The Project on Government Oversight found that GEO Group alone pulled in more than $710 million in ICE contracts in a single year, with CoreCivic close behind at nearly $269 million. Executives and PACs tied to these companies funneled over a million dollars to Trump-aligned political committees during the last election cycle. Detention populations have hit record highs — north of 73,000 people held on a single day this year — while a federal court in Washington State ordered GEO Group to pay millions in back wages after it paid detained people roughly a dollar a day for labor. This is not a deportation policy anymore. It’s a business model, and the people locked inside it are the inventory. As one advocate at the Detention Watch Network put it, the contracts themselves are built to reward incarceration, not to solve anything.
Our 250th birthday itself has been quietly hijacked. Congress created a bipartisan commission, America250, back in 2016, with Barack Obama and George W. Bush agreeing to co-chair it. That’s not a partisan project by design — it’s supposed to belong to all of us. But reporting this week from NPR, the Washington Post, and a joint investigation by Public Citizen and the Revolving Door Project shows that a Trump-aligned organization called Freedom 250 diverted public funds and donor money away from that bipartisan effort, routed roughly $100 million in contracts and grants to allies and insiders, and built a “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall that critics describe as a monument to access-selling — reportedly offering personal time with the president for million-dollar donations. Musical acts pulled out when they realized what they’d actually signed up for. Even some Republican members of Congress have quietly said they wished the anniversary had stayed nonpartisan. Our shared birthday became someone’s fundraising vehicle.
And then there’s the hate, spoken out loud without apology. Following a Supreme Court ruling that stripped protected status from hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants, television and radio host Megyn Kelly went on a rant declaring that immigrants “dilute” a country supposedly built and owned by people like her, telling them to go home because they “won’t assimilate.” Even a Supreme Court justice, in her written dissent, called the administration’s underlying rhetoric about Haitian immigrants racially inflected in language too repellent to reprint. Kelly’s comments are not an isolated slip. They are a permission slip — a signal to anyone still holding onto quiet prejudice that it’s now acceptable to say it out loud on a major platform, and be met with more attention than accountability.
Greed running the birthday party. Profiteering running the detention system. Contempt running the microphone. If you feel exhausted by the news, you’re not imagining it. You’re accurately reading the room.
But Goodness Has Not Left the Building
Here’s the other truth, the one I need you to hold right alongside the first. The very fact that all of this is being exposed — by journalists doing the unglamorous work of reading procurement records, by congressional Democrats demanding hearings, by a Supreme Court dissent willing to name racism plainly, by ordinary Haitians’ colleagues and neighbors publicly refusing to stay silent when Kelly attacked them — is evidence that the immune system of this country is still working. Corruption thrives in the dark. The fact that it’s being dragged into daylight, again and again, means the people still committed to decency have not gone anywhere. They’ve been organizing, filing FOIA requests, showing up to hearings, walking off jobs that asked them to lend their name to something they didn’t believe in.
Protest works. Disclosure works. Naming things works. The backlash to Kelly’s rant came from across the political spectrum, including from a Republican strategist who called it “sickness” on live television. The musical artists who withdrew from the Great American State Fair did so because information reached them and they acted on their conscience. None of that happens in a country that has actually lost its soul.
I think of Daisaku Ikeda’s lifelong argument that a single human revolution, in the heart of one person, can eventually change the destiny of a nation. I don’t offer that as a platitude. I offer it because it is, functionally, how every one of the small acts of integrity I just described actually happened. Somebody decided, alone, in a moment nobody was watching, to tell the truth instead of taking the money. That is the actual American revolution Bernie is asking about. It isn’t waiting to arrive. It’s already scattered across the country in thousands of individual decisions, waiting to find rhythm with each other.
The Deeper Emergency Underneath All of It
Now I want to widen the lens, because everything above is a symptom, not the root.
Greed. Ideological control. The hunger for power that needs an enemy to stay organized. These are the same three forces driving the corruption at our birthday party, the profiteering in our detention centers, and the racism finding new permission to speak — and they are the exact same three forces standing between humanity and a livable climate future. The fossil fuel industry did not invent greed; it just found the most lucrative use for it on record. The instinct to dehumanize immigrants so a detention contract can grow is the same instinct that lets a corporation treat a flooding coastline or a poisoned aquifer as an “externality.” Ideological control that needs Haitian neighbors to be the villain is structurally identical to ideological control that needs climate science to be a hoax. It is one root system with many poisoned fruits.
This is why I keep returning to the Five Emergencies framework: the Climate Emergency, the Ecological/Green Emergency, the Democracy-based Emergency, the Humanity-centered Emergency, and the Refugee Emergency are not five separate crises competing for our attention. They are five faces of the same underlying failure — a failure to place human dignity and planetary survival above short-term extraction and short-term power. You cannot address the Climate and Ecological Emergency by treating it as a technical problem alone, separate from the corruption in our institutions or the cruelty in our politics. Adaptive Resiliency asks us to see the whole pattern, because the people cutting corners on detention center safety are, structurally, the same mindset cutting corners on emissions, on water tables, on the future.
What We Do With This, Together
This is exactly why building Climate Tribe Social has become the priority of my work right now. Not as an escape from these hard truths, but as a gathering place equipped to hold them — a Control Center, if you will, where dialogue circles, community organizing, and Adaptive Resiliency Centers can turn justified outrage into sustained, disciplined action instead of burnout. Awareness alone doesn’t save a coastline or a democracy. Climate competence does. Community does. Showing up, again and again, in relationship with other people who refuse to look away, does.
So on this 250th birthday, here is what I’m asking of you and of myself: grieve what needs grieving, name what needs naming, and then come back to the clave. One steady rhythm, many hands finding it together. That has always been how the real revolutions get made — not by waiting for the corruption to end on its own, but by building something more resilient, more honest, and more humane right alongside it, until it’s simply the stronger current in the room.
Feliz cumpleaños, América. You are 250 years old, deeply wounded, and — because so many of your people still choose goodness on purpose, every single day — very much still worth fighting for.
Amazona y Que Humanidad
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