By Milinda Moragoda
The coming months could bring South Asia and the wider On a humid June evening in Washington, five elderly gentlemen stood quietly beyond the White House gates, watching crowds gather beneath floodlights and giant television screens.
George Washington seemed uneasy. Thomas Jefferson gazed upward at drones moving across the night sky. Alexander Hamilton studied the security cordons with professional interest. Benjamin Franklin appeared delighted by nearly everything he saw. John Adams already looked irritated.
“What is occurring here?” Washington finally asked. A young passerby overheard him.
“You don’t know? It’s the mixed-martial-arts tournament for President Trump’s birthday. And for the country’s birthday too, General Washington. Two hundred and fifty years.”
“The country’s birthday?” Washington asked cautiously.
“Yes sir. Big celebration.”
Franklin smiled.
“Well, George, tavern brawls in Philadelphia were once conducted with considerably less ceremony.”
Music thundered across the White House grounds as giant American flags flashed across digital screens.
Hamilton folded his arms.
“The republic has acquired a taste for spectacle,” he observed.
“So had Rome,” Adams muttered. “By the end.”
A few blocks away, and across the country on other screens, another phrase appeared: No Kings. On Flag Day itself, while one celebration gathered around the presidency, another invoked the oldest American warning against monarchy.
Adams noticed the words first.
“At least,” he said dryly, “someone remembers the point.”
As they moved through the city, another controversy appeared across television broadcasts: proposals for a commemorative 250-dollar note bearing the portrait of the sitting president
Jefferson stopped walking.
“A living face upon the nation’s currency?” he asked. “Have Americans grown fond of kings again?”
Hamilton raised an eyebrow.
“No, Thomas. Only men who mistake popularity for legitimacy.”
Washington remained silent for several moments.
“The presidency,” he finally said, “was meant to restrain ambition, not advertise it.”
Yet even in their unease, they could not dismiss the sheer magnitude of what America had become.
They passed through cities illuminated brighter than daylight. They learned that aircraft carried thousands of people across oceans in hours. They saw surgeons repairing damaged hearts, scientists altering genes, and children holding in their hands devices containing more knowledge than existed in entire libraries during the Revolution.
Franklin was transfixed.
“We once drew fire from the clouds,” he declared. “These people appear to have domesticated it.”
At a medical research institute, Jefferson listened in amazement as physicians described treatments that had extended human life beyond anything his century could have imagined.
“Millions live now,” he said softly, “who in our time would surely have died.”
Hamilton was equally captivated by New York.
From a high room overlooking lower Manhattan at night, he watched financial markets move across immense electronic screens.
“The commercial republic succeeded beyond even my imagination,” he admitted. “Energy, capital, industry — they built a power no European empire could have conceived.”
Adams looked down toward the streets below.
“And yet,” he replied, “they do not appear especially content.”
That judgment followed them across the country.
In Philadelphia they passed homeless encampments standing in the shadows of glittering towers. In struggling rural towns they heard of addiction, despair, and communities hollowed out by economic change.
Everywhere Americans argued bitterly over immigration, race, religion, identity, and patriotism itself.
Citizens no longer merely disagreed with one another. Increasingly, they regarded opponents as enemies.
“The oldest danger to republics,” Adams warned, “is faction.”
Jefferson was less certain.
“The people are loud,” he admitted. “Passionate. Divided. Yet perhaps liberty has always sounded this way.”
“And perhaps,” Adams replied sharply, “civilisations collapse sounding exactly the same.”
Washington listened quietly as citizens debated elections with bitterness bordering upon hatred.
“I warned against the spirit of party,” he said at last.
“Yet party now seems to have become a form of national religion.”
Their most difficult moment came at the National Archives.
There they stood before the Declaration of Independence itself, preserved beneath glass and guarded almost like scripture. Schoolchildren from every imaginable background passed before it — Black, white, Asian, Hispanic, immigrants speaking languages from every continent.
Jefferson stared silently at his own words.
“All men are created equal.”
Franklin leaned closer to the parchment.
“Hancock still takes up half the room,” he said.
Adams frowned.
“Yes, but at least he attached his flourish to a declaration.”
Hamilton glanced toward a television screen nearby, where the president’s looping signature appeared beneath another proclamation.
“In this age,” he said, “the flourish sometimes seems to have become the declaration.”
Nearby, an elected official spoke proudly of a nation where women served as judges, governors, military commanders, and corporate leaders.
Washington seemed genuinely astonished.
“In our time,” he admitted quietly, “such a thing would scarcely have been imagined.”
Franklin smiled.
“Then perhaps our imaginations were too small.”
But the founders’ deepest discomfort emerged when they confronted slavery and the long struggle that followed it. They visited memorials to the Civil War and the civil rights movement. They listened to the words of Martin Luther King Jr. echoing across Washington.
Jefferson appeared shaken.
“The republic fought a terrible war over the contradiction embedded within its own birth,” he said.
“Yes,” Adams replied. “Because once a principle is declared, later generations may insist upon taking it seriously.”
Washington removed his hat before the memorial to Abraham Lincoln.
“He preserved the Union,” he said solemnly. “And perhaps redeemed it.”
They walked next to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where names descended into black stone as though the republic itself had been cut open.
Hamilton, who had spoken so confidently of power, said nothing.
Washington ran his fingers lightly over the polished wall.
“A republic may possess armies,” he said, “but it must never grow careless with the lives it asks of citizens.”
Jefferson looked at the reflected faces of visitors moving across the stone.
“Here,” he said, “victory is not the only measure of history.”
For a long moment none of them spoke.
Finally Jefferson asked quietly:
“Do they judge us harshly?”
A young Black student standing nearby overheard the question.
“Sometimes,” she answered honestly. “But the story did not end with you.”
Jefferson looked at her carefully and, for the first time that day, smiled faintly.
At the Pentagon they heard briefings on tensions with China, instability in the Middle East, cyber warfare, artificial intelligence, and fears surrounding Iran’s nuclear ambitions. They learned that America maintained military commitments across oceans and continents unimaginable to the fragile republic born in 1776.
Washington appeared weary.
“We once hoped to avoid permanent entanglements of this kind.”
Jefferson nodded.
“Yes. But perhaps a nation this powerful cannot remain untouched by the world.”
On the evening of the Fourth of July, the five founders stood at the edge of a crowd watching fireworks rise above the National Mall. Hundreds of thousands gathered around them. Children waved flags. Immigrants took oaths of citizenship. Protesters marched peacefully nearby. Soldiers stood watch. Church bells echoed across the capital.
For a long time, the founders said nothing.
Then Franklin spoke softly.
“Well, gentlemen, the experiment appears not to have failed.”
“No,” Washington replied, gazing across the immense republic before him. “But neither is it finished.”
Jefferson watched the crowds.
“They are still arguing about liberty.”
Adams reluctantly smiled.
“That may be the clearest evidence,” he admitted, “that the republic yet lives.”
Hamilton looked toward the illuminated skyline stretching into the distance.
“History will judge our failures,” he said. “But no one will say the American experiment lacked ambition.”
Fireworks thundered across the summer sky.
And somewhere within the spectacle, the wealth, the division, the triumphs and anxieties of two and a half centuries, one truth remained self-evident: the experiment in self-government was still alive, and still unfinished.
(Milinda Moragoda is founder of the Pathfinder Foundation strategic think tank. Courtesy VIONEWS and writer Can be contacted via [email protected])