I hope you’re feeling a little more patriotic.

The visiting international spectators at the FIFA matches should have stirred something in all of us. The Fourth of July, despite the strange weather, managed to break through the clouds long enough to remind us there is still much worth celebrating.

Oddly, there are Americans who seem to hold their own country in contempt. Yet talk to many new citizens who escaped communist or socialist governments, and you’ll often hear a very different perspective. They still see the United States as a remarkable experiment in human freedom. I challenge the cynics to name another nation founded on a greater principle than the simple idea that every person is born with equal worth and endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

America has never been perfect. It wasn’t in 1776, and it isn’t today. But our founding creed remains one of the most extraordinary declarations ever written. The question isn’t whether we’ve always lived up to it. The question is whether we still believe it’s worth striving toward.

Today we are divided by politics, race, class, religion, gender, and economics. Social media, partisan media, and political incentives often reward outrage over understanding. Whatever the causes, the result is the same: Americans spend enormous amounts of energy fighting one another while too little energy is spent solving the problems we all recognize.

Why aren’t more people demanding better schools as our educational standing slips? Why aren’t we insisting on greater accountability for public spending? Why do so many of us feel powerless in the face of rising costs and growing distrust? Are we too busy? Too exhausted? Too discouraged? Or have we simply forgotten that self-government requires citizens who are willing to participate?

One of the most powerful stories from the American Revolution isn’t a battle. It’s what happened when the Declaration of Independence was signed.

On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration. Most delegates signed it several weeks later, on August 2. They knew exactly what they were doing. By placing their names on that document, they were committing treason against the British Crown–a crime punishable by death.

According to tradition, Benjamin Franklin looked around the room and quietly observed, “We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

Everyone laughed. Everyone also knew he meant every word.

Many of the fifty-six signers paid dearly. Thomas Nelson Jr. urged American artillery to fire on his own mansion after British officers occupied it. Carter Braxton lost ships and much of his fortune. Francis Lewis saw his home destroyed, while his wife was captured by the British and later died after her imprisonment. Others lost property, businesses, health, and years with their families.

They were merchants, lawyers, farmers, physicians, and businessmen. They were not guaranteed victory. In truth, defeat probably seemed more likely than success.

That is why their example still matters 250 years later.

Patriotism wasn’t waving a flag after winning a war. It was quietly signing your name to a piece of paper when it might cost you everything.

Freedom wasn’t handed to future generations. It was entrusted to them.

Now it has been entrusted to us.

The founders cannot preserve the Republic they created. That responsibility belongs to each generation in turn. If we want our children and grandchildren to inherit the same freedoms we inherited, we cannot assume someone else will protect them.

In the end, the future of America has always depended on ordinary citizens deciding that the principles of the Declaration are worth defending–not with hatred for one another, but with the courage, character, and commitment to live by them.

Every generation is tested differently. The founders faced muskets and monarchs. We face confusion, cynicism, division, and a constant barrage of information competing for our attention. It has become easier to argue with our neighbors than to sit beside them. Easier to retreat into our own corners than to remember that we are, despite everything, fellow Americans.

The answer will not come from Washington alone. It will come from living rooms, churches, schools, libraries, town halls, veterans’ organizations, volunteer groups, and conversations between people willing to listen as well as speak. It will come from parents teaching their children that freedom is inseparable from responsibility and that rights are sustained only when citizens possess the character to defend them.

Two hundred and fifty years after those signatures dried on parchment, the question remains remarkably simple. Will we leave this country stronger than we found it, or weaker? Will we be remembered as the generation that complained while the foundations cracked, or the one that rediscovered the courage to repair them?

The founders gave us an extraordinary inheritance. What we leave behind is entirely up to us.