As we celebrate Independence Day, it’s worth reflecting on America’s founding character — especially the man who defined it: George Washington.
Washington didn’t build his legacy on grand speeches. He led with silence, sacrifice, and restraint. He may not have written poetry, but he lived it — with grit in war, grace in peace, and great wisdom in his letters, journals, and Farewell Address.
This Fourth of July, as fireworks fill the night sky, let’s also make room for silence — for healing, for grief, for endurance.
He didn’t just fight for a nation — he helped shape its soul. Washington understood that a country isn’t defined only by its victories, but by how it makes meaning out of its wounds.
In our time of division and disillusionment, we would do well to reclaim the legacy Washington embodied. Resilience isn’t the denial of pain but rather transformation through it. And the only vision worth holding on to is the one that unites us in building our future as a nation.
Trauma doesn’t end the story. Often, it begins the most meaningful chapters. That’s true in my life — and in America’s. Growth has never come from comfort. It comes from hardship, from wounds we don’t hide from but confront. Psychologists call it “post-traumatic growth.” It’s the idea that suffering, when faced and integrated, can lead to deeper purpose, stronger relationships, and a more grounded sense of self.
I guess most Americans would just call it “history.”
I led soldiers into Iraq in 2003 and returned to a nation largely untouched by the war I had lived. But my reckoning came later — when a brief Wall Street career collapsed, when a home invasion shattered my sense of safety, and when therapy forced me to face what I had tried for years to outrun: trauma, guilt, grief.
What followed wasn’t just recovery. It was transformation — a quiet strength rooted in humility and meaning. Post-traumatic growth teaches that suffering, when faced honestly, can lead to deeper purpose, stronger relationships, and a more grounded self.
That truth doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to us all.
From Valley Forge to Gettysburg, from the Great Depression to Ground Zero, America has been forged in fire. Our greatest progress has rarely come in peacetime. Lincoln didn’t rise when things were easy. The Greatest Generation wasn’t shaped in comfort. Renewal always follows rupture.
We’re in such a moment again. Pressure is building — on our national identity, our personal stories, our sense of unity. But pressure can forge something stronger, if we let it.
We must reject the lie that trauma equals weakness. PTSD is real — often invisible, often devastating. But it’s not the end of the story. Alongside post-traumatic stress, we can teach post-traumatic strength. The kind Washington lived. The kind America has always needed.
That’s part of why I wrote “Downriver: Memoir of a Warrior Poet.” Yes, it tells a story of trauma — from childhood instability to the battlefields of Iraq, from Wall Street collapse to personal unraveling. But more importantly, it traces the long road of healing — not as a tidy comeback story, but as a messy, hard-earned path toward growth and integration.
The journey is not reserved for veterans alone. It belongs to survivors of addiction, loss, illness, injustice, and personal collapse. It belongs to first responders, caregivers, and ordinary Americans living through extraordinary hardship.
But growth isn’t guaranteed. It requires honesty. It requires community. It demands a culture willing to honor both the warrior and the poet — the one who endures and the one who reflects, the one who fights and the one who heals.
Too often, we swing between denial and despair. But what if we told a different story? What if we treated our national wounds not as signs of weakness but as calls to deepen our roots?
We’ve done it before. The post-9/11 generation gave us new models of service and empathy. The scars of the COVID-19 pandemic will never fully heal, but they can teach us lessons about connection, community, and what really matters.
The question isn’t whether we’ve been wounded. We have. The real question is what kind of country we’ll become in response. Will we let trauma divide us further — or use it to rediscover what binds us together?
This Fourth of July, as fireworks fill the night sky, let’s also make room for silence — for healing, for grief, for endurance. Let’s honor not only what we’ve won but how we’ve grown.
That’s the path of the warrior poet. That’s Washington’s legacy. And it can be ours, too.
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