It’s fitting that I was in Boston last week, bringing senior citizens from Iowa to the places that were so integral to the start of the American Revolution.

I’d had enough with the news last week. It was painful to tune in and witness the moments that served to make a mockery of our great country, that showed a nation so divided we couldn’t even agree on the importance of due process–an evolutionary leap in governing that separates our country from barbarians by presuming someone is innocent until proven guilty.

By the time I left for Boston, I was more than ready to tune out the noise from Washington, D.C., and Hollywood and the mainstream media. And I spent several days walking the cobblestone streets of Boston, pointing out statues of Paul Revere and George Washington, happy those statues were still there and not sitting in a warehouse because they had offended someone.

At Faneuil Hall, I paused, and told my group the story of Peter Faneuil who built the marketplace at his own expense as a gift to the city in 1743, and how, as an afterthought, he added a second floor meeting room.

It was in that meeting room the Sons Of Liberty met to discuss independence from Royal authority in England: Paul Revere, John Adams, Sam Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock and others.

I always ask my groups to think about that particular group of men. They were some of the most forward thinking, illuminated and intelligent men ever gathered in one city at one time. I don’t think the universe has yet replicated such a group: writers, thinkers, inventors, land owners, tradesmen, businessmen– all of inordinate skill.

What stars had aligned at the exact moment in history we needed such leadership and courage, that these men were living in Boston together, able to create and pen one of the most beautiful and enlightened documents known to man thus far: the Declaration on Independence.

And they were there to rouse passion in the colonists, and to outsmart British authority, and bring their little rag tag army to Bunker Hill and make a go of it against the most powerful military the world had ever seen.

We didn’t win that battle but we proved we had spunk. And passion. And in the end, it was that spunk and passion that won our independence. It certainly wasn’t our fancy uniforms or our well-trained militia. We had no Navy; we had only our desire.

The colonists fought hard for freedom– the kind of freedom all peoples have always desired: the freedom to pursue happiness. To worship freely. To expect privacy. To bear arms lest our government rise up against us. And to speak our minds.

The words I spoke in front of Faneuil Hall were ever more poignant on that sunny October day. Because no matter the politics of each individual in the group, there is no denying that our story as a country is an important story, and that upon hearing it again, we should feel compelled to be better caretakers. This land exemplifies the most important experiment ever undertaken in our earth’s history, and when you’re standing in Boston looking up at the windows where Sam Adams once stood, you feel it, and you know it and you remember it again.

I have my own theories as to why this dysfunction has taken over this country that so many love and pray for. It has to do with forces that seem bigger than we are hoping to bend America to their will. It is something I became aware of in 1997 as a young reporter and I have watched for more than twenty years as the country I grew up in has become unrecognizable.

I left Boston believing that I, as well as all Americans, must see ourselves as caretakers, beholden to the idea that we are all she has.

And that we have to trust ourselves as common men, like Paul Revere, to stand up and do what is right for our country, no matter the personal cost.

We the people.

I love this quote uttered by William F. Buckley once:

“I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”

Paul Revere was a coppersmith.

Remember that.