My mother fled Cuba and found the freedom too many Americans now forget

I've always believed that gratitude is the most underrated of all human traits, and ingratitude is among the ugliest. A person who cannot recognize what they've been given, who cannot feel the weight of unearned blessing, has a hole in their soul that no amount of achievement can fill. It’s true of people and nations.

America, I am sorry that some in this country do not love you. Sad that a record low number of young Americans say they are proud.

This breaks my heart, not because dissent is wrong, but because that failure belongs to the adults who came before. Every generation that failed to explain to the next what was purchased so that they might live freely. Every classroom that taught grievance instead of gratitude. Every voice that spent more time promoting protests and condemnations over preaching unity and collaboration.

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I’m sorry that so many are rejecting the free enterprise system that lifted more people out of poverty in history for the siren call of socialism.

America we know you aren’t perfect, but something seems to have gotten lost in our national conversation: Birthdays are celebrations, not condemnations. We don't gather around a cake to catalog mistakes and shortcomings. We gather to say you matter, you are loved, and we are glad you are here.

I am glad you are here, America. I am profoundly, irreversibly glad.

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Because the real American story is one of breathtaking courage and grit.

The Declaration of Independence was not merely a farewell or protest letter to a distant king. It became a promissory note for every subsequent generation to redeem. Thomas Jefferson wrote the most consequential document outside of Scripture in the history of humanity that turned into the mission statement for a new nation.

We keep going back to it because it keeps being right.

Because the real American story is one of opportunity.

America, you have given more second chances to more people of more faiths, colors, and creeds than any country in the history of the world. That is the most extraordinary experiment in human self-governance ever attempted on this earth and it is still running. Still imperfect. Still striving. Still magnificent.

During the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games when over a hundred countries march into the stadium during the Parade of Nations, only one nation sends a delegation that looks like the entire world. Only one. America.

America, you have given the world a people intensely competitive and intensely generous No nation on this planet gives as much money to charitable causes as the United States of America. When disaster strikes anywhere on earth, the first question is never whether Americans will show up. It is only how soon.

America produced a good, decent, and noble people and a country that has done that deserves to celebrate its birthday.

I know this because of my mother, Miriam Miyares. In 1965, she fled communist Cuba homeless and penniless, with nothing but the clothes on her back and no idea where her next meal would come from. She came to you, America as so many have come to you, not because the journey was easy, but because you were worth the risk.

Almost fifty years to the day after Miriam Miyares escaped a country with a government with no consent from the governed, she walked into a voting booth in Virginia and she cast a ballot for her son, her American son, to represent her in the oldest democracy in the Western Hemisphere, the Virginia General Assembly.

That is the American Miracle.

Today, while the same communist regime in Cuba clings to power as its citizens slide further into a humanitarian crisis, the Miyares Family not only sees the American Miracle, but lives it.

On this birthday, America, I want you to know that my family knows the costs and know the stakes. We know what the world looks like without America because the Miyares Family lived it.

On this Independence Day, it would behoove us all to remember the words of another Virginian, Thomas Jefferson: "If a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was & never will be."

Happy Birthday, America.

We love you. We are grateful. And we are proud. Let’s all do our part educating the next generation about the American Miracle so it lives on for another 250 years and beyond.