It didn’t start out so great. In fact, a case could be made that the United States was born a mistake, and our life as a people has been one of struggle to get it right.

We let the founders make a compromise that cost an entire people their freedom, even in chains as they were helping to build our country. It took a Civil War and the expenditure of 600,000 American lives, but we got it right.

We excluded more than half our population from the right to participate in decisions about their, and our, lives. But with women’s suffrage, we got it right.

We spent a hundred years keeping the heel of a massive boot on the lives of the people allegedly freed by the Civil War, but the Civil Rights and Voting Rights laws got it right, and the struggle to hold onto those rights continues.

We entered and fought in two world wars to save the world, but we didn’t save ourselves from our own discriminatory evil and made Black people fight in those wars in segregated units without full citizenship, but when Truman integrated the services in 1948, we got it right.

We got involved in a foreign war in which we had no interests and which we fought in ways both immoral and illegal, and we caused the deaths of tens of thousands of our soldiers and more than a million innocents, but a movement of young people and enlightened elders forced us to end the war in Vietnam, and we got it right.

We cursed ourselves and those around us by turning our heads from poverty and need, but we took steps beginning with Social Security for the aged and programs like food stamps and Women and Infant Children for the young, and with a continuing series of experiments to deal with this intractable problem, we’re still trying to get it right, and the struggle to help the needy among us continues.

We denied half the population control over their own reproductive health for most of our history, and with Roe, our Supreme Court got it right. Then a totalitarian movement stripped away women’s rights in more than half the states and criminalized what had been legal. Through ballot measures and a powerful movement of women and their supporters, we are attempting to recover what has been taken from our wives and sisters and daughters, and we have had successes in getting it right, and we’re still fighting.

We allowed ourselves to get involved in two more wars that we had no business in fighting and which cost us the lives of thousands of our sons and daughters and the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocents abroad, but we beat the man who lied us into those wars, and we got ourselves out of them, and we corrected our errors at home, if not abroad.

We spent a century and a half failing citizens who had spent their entire lives working to build this country with medical care many of them could not afford in retirement, and failed the needy who could not afford medical care for themselves and their children, but with Medicare, and then Medicaid, and then Obamacare, we began to get it right.

For more than 200 years, we consigned gay people to invisibility and disdain and made their love an illegal act and banned them from showing their patriotism in serving this country in the military and prevented them from marrying, but then our Congress and the Supreme Court got it right, and the struggle to secure those rights continues.

We are a country so prosperous and sorted out when it comes to opportunity and freedom that millions have wanted to come here to join our democracy and our economy, and over the last two and a half centuries, we have welcomed them, and periodically it has been a struggle to hold open our arms, but the struggle continues to get it right.

We allowed a huckster and conman to lie his way into the White House, and he went on to appoint criminals to high office. He proceeded to lie and steal and through criminal negligence helped to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens in a terrible pandemic as he stole from the national treasury and rewarded cronies for crimes both large and small, but we beat him at the ballot box when he ran for reelection, and with good will and love of country and each other, we will get it right again.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott.