It would be easy to say, as some are, that the United States has made its final turn for the worse and no longer will be the country many once thought of as the best and brightest in the world.
Indeed, recent Supreme Court decisions easily give rise to the belief that the rule of law no longer means what it says and that the country has lost its moral center.
But the United States has been down before, in recent memory and in distant history, and has risen from the deck to shine. On this Independence Day, we need to believe that to feel the best days for the country are still ahead of us.
Yes, the generations that perpetuated those recent rebounds are dead or dying and the ones behind them sometimes appear self-centered and lacking a moral compass, but people can change. Indeed, tough times often cause the selfishness in people to give way to a strength and concern for others that they didn't know they had.
Even in the last 50 years or so, people despaired for the country's future, only to have a leader come along, events transpire or time simply pass that changed things.
The sudden and violent death of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 ushered in the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. His term saw the adoption of many positive civil rights laws but also social programs that have kept many people in a never-ending cycle of poverty as well as an escalated and divisive war in Vietnam.
Many wondered during the darkest days of the Vietnam War if the country could ever heal. But it did, and Vietnam veterans today are not the pariahs they were considered by many at the end of that war.
The election of Richard Nixon as president brought an end - in time - to the war but also gave rise to the Watergate crisis that seemed for a moment to be a threat to the Constitution. His successor, Gerald Ford, brought a brief period of normalcy to the country, but a weak economy grew poorer under Ford's successor, Jimmy Carter, and the country fell into a time of malaise.
Under the following three presidents, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, the country experienced a more positive and peaceful era, but the events of Sept. 11, 2001, made many people believe domestic terror would be a constant threat for the future. It wasn't, but a housing bubble-fueled, deep economic recession that struck in late 2008 and a still-sputtering recovery seven years later have made people wonder whether a robust economy can ever be a possibility again.
Yet, in a country where even the poor have wealth that Third World countries can only dream of, we complain about too much air conditioning, cable television going out or having to drive to get a propane tank refilled for the grill.
We forget that the Revolutionary War was a battle for the country's mere existence as a sovereign nation, the War of 1812 a battle to keep it and the Civil War a battle that nearly drove it apart from within.
Dust bowls, the Great Depression, hurricanes, floods and tornadoes have wreaked devastation since but in the long stretch of our America became only marks on a timeline. World wars took thousands of our precious soldiers, forced us to do without but ultimately pulled us together so we were able to emerge from them stronger, fitter and more resourceful.
In recent months, we have seen black churches bombed, disputes with police spill into riots, and religious and other freedoms threatened, and we feel scared and isolated. And that's the way we'll always feel unless we see what there is to celebrate in the midst of trouble.
There, in the mist left by the rocket's red glare and the bombs bursting in air, is an America where a U.S. women's soccer team unites millions, where a beautiful ballerina becomes the first black principal dancer in the history of the American Ballet Theatre and where an oft-scorned Tennessee state senator can sponsor a bill to allow illegal immigrant children brought here through no fault of their own to have an opportunity at a college education.
We know, still, the promise is there, even if it sometimes feels buried, bruised or burdened, because we live in the land of the free and the home of the brave.