When America celebrated its 250th birthday this weekend, I expected to feel the same exhilaration I experienced during the Bicentennial in 1976.
Instead, I felt something else.
Fifty years ago, I was a law student in Boston. I stood on the Esplanade with my mother listening to Arthur Fiedler conduct the Boston Pops as fireworks illuminated the Charles River. Like millions of Americans, I believed I was witnessing a once-in-a-lifetime celebration of our nation.
This year, life intervened.
Family obligations, work, and the ordinary demands that accompany getting older crowded out the celebration I had imagined for decades. At first, I felt as though I had somehow missed America’s birthday.
Then I realized something important.
Perhaps the greatest tribute to America is not found in parades or fireworks. It is found in the opportunities that quietly shape our lives every single day.
That realization caused me to reflect on a journey I never could have predicted.
As a teenager, I believed communism represented the future. I was sincere. I wanted fairness, opportunity, and a better life for ordinary people. My objectives have not changed in sixty years.
What changed was my understanding of how societies actually achieve those goals.
Around 1980, someone handed me Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose. I expected to disagree with it. Instead, it forced me to question assumptions I had carried since high school. Friedman demonstrated that incentives matter, prices convey information, and millions of free individuals making independent decisions generally outperform even the brightest central planners.
My political conversion was not emotional. It was intellectual.
Later, I had the privilege of serving in the Reagan Administration, first at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and then at the Department of Energy. There I witnessed one of the most successful public policy transformations of the twentieth century: restructuring America’s natural gas markets.
Many people call it deregulation, but that misses the point. The achievement was not removing government. It was redesigning the institutions so markets could function effectively. Government established the rules; free people made the decisions.
The results transformed American energy.
That experience permanently changed the way I think about government. Good government is indispensable, but one of its highest responsibilities is creating institutions that allow citizens—not bureaucracies—to solve problems themselves.
Those lessons extend far beyond economics.
America’s true genius has never been that our leaders are wiser than everyone else. It is that our Constitution assumes they are not.
Our Founders understood that concentrated power is dangerous regardless of who possesses it. They divided authority, created checks and balances, protected freedom of speech, and trusted ordinary citizens with extraordinary responsibility.
That constitutional architecture remains one of humanity’s greatest achievements.
It also explains why America continues to surprise so many visitors.
In recent weeks, I have watched countless videos of tourists who arrived expecting an arrogant, declining nation and instead discovered generous people, breathtaking landscapes, vibrant communities, and a country of astonishing scale and optimism. Whether one agrees with every policy or every political leader is beside the point. America is larger than any administration or election.
It is an idea.
An imperfect idea, to be sure.
Our history contains injustice alongside greatness. We have made serious mistakes. We always will. But ours is one of the few nations built upon the proposition that people are free to challenge accepted wisdom, change their minds, build something new, fail, and begin again.
I have lived that story personally.
A child from public housing became a lawyer, taught law, helped shape national energy policy, and now spends his retirement trying to improve education in Oklahoma. That journey could have happened in very few places on earth.
As I reflected on America’s 250th birthday, I realized I had not missed the celebration after all.
America was present in every opportunity my life afforded me.
It was present every time I was free to question prevailing opinion.
Every time I was permitted to change my mind.
Every time I was allowed to build something that had not existed before.
That, ultimately, is what America means to me.
Not perfection.
Possibility.
And after 250 years, that remains something worth celebrating.
About the author: Ken Malloy is a retired energy policy lawyer and former federal regulatory strategist who has spent the last several years working to improve K–12 education governance in Oklahoma. He writes on civic accountability, institutional reform, and the responsibilities of self-government. He can be reached at ken@caem.org.
With this article he wrote, “It is increasingly obvious to me that I have to count down to oblivion. Thus I’m thinking of making publication weekly in Tulsa Today of observations of a 74 year old eastern elitist who fell in love with Oklahoma and its people.”
Ken, we appreciate you and welcome your increasing contributions on Tulsa Today. Thank you.