This piece began with my eight-year-old grandson Arnold and a stack of children’s books about the American Revolution.
We read about King George and George Washington, Paul Revere and the Swamp Fox, Lafayette and the colonies, patriots and loyalists, liberty and rebellion. We read the stories we hand down to children—the brave ride, the righteous cause, the birth of a nation.
But as I sat there with Arnold, in South Carolina, one of the original thirteen colonies, with America’s 250th birthday approaching, I kept feeling something else rising up from the pages.
The Revolution was not only a war against a king. It was an argument over power. Over who gets a voice. Who takes advantage. Who counts as fully human. Who gets protected by law—and who is left out. Who is asked to sacrifice. Who is told to wait. And who drags us down into corrupt dirt.
And that argument did not end in 1776.
It did not end at Yorktown.
It did not end with the Constitution.
It has been fought again and again—through slavery and abolition, through women’s suffrage, through civil rights, through every struggle to make the country live up to the words it loves to quote.
So this piece is about the Revolution we celebrate—and the Revolution still unfinished.
It’s about what we teach our children, what we leave out, what we inherit, and what we owe the future.
Listen to THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION.
Thank you, as always, for reading and listening.
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