This isn’t about you. The value of your story is for others who find strength, perspective and reason in the human experience. The past has no power over your present but it does matter as a service to others. What serves my community also serves me. 

I’ve pledged allegiance to this flag and no other. The severing and suffering of my ancestors resulted in a child who calls the constitution home, born and bred to defend truth and justice.

There were few male figures in the homes I grew up in. Yet I was mesmerized by a grand vision of my forefathers. Not only did I look up to it, I couldn’t wait to grow up and own it, breath it, even die for it’s romance. More importantly, I wanted to live brightly, be that grand. 

To be a stakeholder citizen in a nation carved so that the people ruled the government, a mere mechanism to establishing the joy and liberty we dream of donating to our children and sharing with those we love.

I know fortune being raised in a land of fortunates. I, an only son to an only mother. The only to graduate high school and college. The only one to write and engineer. I’m grateful for what I’ve created today as I recall the misfortunes given to my past.

In fact, it is the darkest moments that have offered the brightest views of life. America offers the best and worst of what this planet has to offer. Light and dark are forces of nature, neither good nor bad. It is human doing that creates a negative or positive outcome of what is. I see the results of my dispassion on everything I claim to love. I see I can change the world if it were a goal, how I haven’t been desperate enough to make it one. 

Yet Inspiration overcomes me to be an effective and efficient citizen. That takes more than filling out ballot bubbles and paying taxes. A free nation thrives on the will of people who drive change and make it work. Scarcely have I made the effort to create the nation I want to fall in living love with.

Worse, I am joined by millions more who are proud of what they have not done, rather than what they have. My proud Americans in their sadness and anger. Filled with privileged surrender to uncertainty, without responsibility. Here in a place founded on the concept that every single person has the civil obligation to lead our nation forward, free of it’s past. 

I take pride in being a citizen of building, creating and upgrading a nation capable of shifting an entire planet. My people’s culture is of pioneering possibility, reaching beyond our wildest dreams.

America the young, baby nation, stronger than it realizes, completely self absorbed. Yet asked to lead the conversation with nations far older. The wisdom of children: a force that authentically propels a child to walk. It is that same knowing that prepares her to fall, tumble, get it wrong over and again. In fact, failing and uncertainty are foundations to every child’s success.

The United States continues to grow and it’s people have steps to take on a ground that shakes, spins and isn’t always clear. That is where the original vision sheds so much light on the power there is to create a more perfection.

Your intentions, decisions and actions are necessary to establish a more perfect Union ruled by justice and tranquility. Sentiments written into the Constitution in an era when liberties were far more scarce and they dared to be greater.

History teaches the costs of giving such powers to a select few. Our stories build a country of this stature because the people are vessels of power. A legacy that continues to upgrade Earth beyond it’s darkest eras.

America has never been about a person in an office. America is about the people who pioneer, who stand tall and who push the vision forward. Always.[]

Jaebi is a professional writer, trainer and development coach based in New York City.