After 250 years, we’ve become accustomed to our freedom and independence. Have you ever contemplated what the country would be like if the American Revolution never happened? Without the revolution, the United States wouldn’t exist today. The world would be a very, very different place. See, no revolution means we never had that Tea Party in Boston harbor. So, the thirteen colonies remain British territories. That means no Honest Abe, FDR or JFK. No Congress, no Constitution and no Supreme Court as we know them. We also drive on the wrong side of the street, and we all have really bad teeth.
George Washington never crosses the Delaware so his face isn’t on the quarter coin or the dollar bill. He’s just a wealthy landowner in Virginia with wooden teeth. Americans vote for mayors, governors and local representatives, but national leadership is nonexistent. And that’s just the governance part. Without a horrific U.S. Civil War, slavery survives far longer. The institution remains economically entrenched for decades. Slavery ends through economic and moral pressure—but it survives into the mid 1900’s. Fearing diseases that were killing off their tribes, the native Americans negotiate with the Brits for their own territory. They consolidate and retreat west of the Mississippi to form the Indian Colonies of America. They master agriculture and grow wealthy exporting grain and livestock across North America and Europe. Florida remains a colony of Spain and the Louisiana Purchase never happens. The modern United Colonies of America is confined largely to the eastern portion of the continent.
Beyond governance and geography, the country looks a lot different demographically. Consider that around 750,000 men died in the American Revolution and Civil War, many simply due to disease or exposure. Without those deaths, roughly 25 million more babies are born. Among them are some exceptional founders, engineers, scientists and leaders who change the world. The simple truth is that most progress comes from a relatively small number of people with unusual combinations of intelligence, ambition, courage and an insane amount of energy.
Most of humanity’s greatest technological leaps were born here, in America. In 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright flew 120 feet at 6.8 mph. Just 41 years later, the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star fighter jet reached 600 mph. Just 65 years after the Wright brothers took flight, Neil Armstrong took one “small step for man” and planted the American flag on the moon. In the 1980s the defense department wanted to create a way to communicate after a potential catastrophic nuclear attack. They created a communications network called the internet. Later the defense department arranged to launch satellites to better monitor troop movements and to improve missile targeting. That created the Global Positioning System or GPS.
Without the American Revolution there is no United States of America. There is no internet and no GPS. No Google, Apple, Waze, Uber, Tesla, etc. Without the United States of America, slavery and other injustices persist for generations. The question isn’t whether war is horrible. It is. But it’s worth remembering that what emerged from the ashes is the most prosperous, innovative and powerful nation in human history.
It’s become fashionable for politicians to take shots at our form of government and our approach to capitalism. Ignore them. We should be grateful to live in a country built by extraordinary risk-takers, builders, inventors and dreamers. We inherited freedom, opportunity and abundance that much of the world still dreams about. May God bless these United States of America for another 250 years.
