Today America is 250 years old. Many are despondent or enraged over the loss of American democracy. I am at Antietam, site of the bloodiest single day in American history. Why am I here? What is there to celebrate?

On September 17, 1862, roughly 23,000 Americans fell here in twelve hours.

Five days later, Abraham Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation which declared that if the rebelling states did not return to the Union, their enslaved people would “be then, thenceforward, and forever free”. He had been waiting for a Union victory to act.

At Antietam, the words in our Declaration that “all men are created equal” began, barely, to become true.

The founders wrote a promise larger than their practice. Every generation since has had to make it more true. In 1863, emancipation. In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery. In 1868, the Fourteenth made every person born on this soil a citizen – the same words the current administration asked the Supreme Court to unwrite in April. In 1870, the Fifteenth put the vote in the Constitution. In 1920, women won the vote. In 1965, the Voting Rights Act enforced it. Just last month the Supreme Court unwrote that protection, and barely upheld birthright citizenship.

Each of our advances required Americans who acted as if the promise were already true, and demanded that the country catch up.

Two hundred fifty years in, the promise still requires such people.

I am celebrating with hope that they still exist.