Freedom to Flourish
Today is my birthday. (The “37th” according to a dear friend ☺.) Matt and I decided to celebrate the occasion by spending the past week driving across America, from Boise, Idaho, all the way back to Washington, D.C. It was like pressing the reboot button on your computer after staring at that spinning wheel for way too long. Frustration is replaced with hope, and a sense that everything is going to work itself out. Traversing the Land of the Free, liberated for a moment from the endless spinning wheel of politics, I am once again reminded of the physical beauty, and beautiful promise, of America.
We visited dear friends and supporters in Boise, listened to country music at a honky-tonk in Emigrant, Montana, dodged a very large bison in Yellowstone National Park, and met a wonderful woman working the deli counter at an Albertsons, her hair dyed stars and stripes, red, white, and blue. Take that, blue-haired Libs! We drank perfect double IPAs in Decorah, Iowa at the same brewery Matt drove to in the Spring of 2020 in defiance of lockdown orders. And we passed through four midwestern states of endless cornfields, none as high as an elephant’s eye, at least not yet.
As we crossed into Iowa, the sign acknowledging the state line seemed to capture the spirit of it all perfectly: “Freedom to Flourish.” This is modern shorthand, it turns out, for Iowa’s official motto, adopted in 1847: “Our Liberties We Prize and Our Rights We Will Maintain.”
Liberty, and perseverance. Sounds about right.
Despite our never-ending challenges, America remains the greatest nation on Earth. Nowhere else offers such opportunity to shape your own destiny and pursue your own happiness. If you are lucky enough to be an American, you can rise above your circumstances, work hard, innovate, fail, pick yourself up, and build a life of purpose and joy.
It’s a beautiful story, one we love to tell at Free the People. Our work is about inspiring people with these prized American values built on liberty—the ideas that let us flourish.
