I’m proud to be an American. I write those words because, somewhere along the way, to be a proud American felt more like a confession than a point of pride. In recent years, many Americans have been made to feel ashamed for being, well, American. As we mark 250 years of independence this July, it’s time to remind ourselves that we’re part of the greatest country in the world.
However, you wouldn’t always get that impression if you relied on media coverage. If you base your conception of America on cable news, you might come away believing that this place isn’t too far removed from a modern-day dystopia. Everyone always seems to be fighting. It’s an unsafe place to travel. Radicals, on both the left and right, are roaming the streets. But this simply isn’t true.
Every so often, however, something breaks through the noise and reminds us that this country is far bigger than the worst headlines ascribed to it. This summer, that something has been the world’s most important soccer tournament.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup brought roughly 1.24 million international visitors to cities across the United States, plenty with cameras and probably low expectations. But what they found was a pleasant surprise. A Scottish traveler filmed an ice maker dropping cubes into his water bottle and called it life-changing. A Norwegian boy ordering his first In-N-Out burger went viral for the sheer joy on his face. A German road-tripper crossed the South and reviewed his first Waffle House at one in the morning: “10/10, we will be coming back.”
The food and the gas stations got the laughs. A Buc-ee’s left grown men speechless. But scroll through enough of these clips and you realize the part that lands hardest is the people. Wherever visitors have gone, they’ve bragged about the kindness and generosity of Americans.
One German visitor was about to walk an hour to the stadium in the rain when a hotel receptionist he’d never met offered to drive him there. A deli owner handed a group of British tourists free lunch, just because they had come so far. Firemen in Alabama gave foreign fans a tour of the station and sent them home with merch. In Lawrence, Kan., residents welcomed the Algerian national team with flags, scarves, and a marching band that had learned the country’s anthem.
None of this was the result of elaborate staging. It was ordinary Americans, from every region, being themselves in front of people who likely weren’t expecting it.
By the time columnists started noticing, the sentiment had already crystallized online into a line that’s worth remembering: If you want to hate America, watch the news. If you want to love it, get in a car and drive across it. Fans who dropped into the middle of the country were running straight into a kind of everyday decency that flows from the values those small towns still live by. That’s the America I know. It’s not flawless, not without sin, but generous and unpretentious in ways that almost never make the broadcast.
There’s something fitting about all this arriving in our 250th year. Washington has spent months building toward the anniversary, and there’s always a temptation to treat a milestone like that as a formality, a date to salute between the goings on of the upcoming weekend. But a country is a place, a people, and an inheritance – not merely a flag to wave around or a set of political values.
I’m convinced that what moved those visitors had nothing to do with our politics. It was the texture of the place, the friendliness, the abundance, the willingness of strangers to put themselves out for one another. We are so used to it that we forget it isn’t the standard everywhere. Sometimes, it takes a fresh set of eyes to remind us what we have.
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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.
Image credit: NARA and DVIDS Public Domain Archives
