What is the United States of America, besides 250 years old?

The country just had its semiquincentennial: the bunting, the fireworks, the cookouts, the renovations in Washington, D.C.

What, exactly, was being commemorated?

A land? A people? A set of stories, some harmonizing and some colliding? Or is what we call “America” like each of us: a jumble of juxtaposed fragments (thoughts and desires, stories and attitudes) masquerading as a whole?

That’s how the famous American poet Walt Whitman framed it: We contain multitudes.

But let’s put us — America and its multitudinousness — in context, starting with our geographical region.

Mount Rainier has grown over the millennia, bit by bit. Hot ash and lava periodically flow down its slopes, cool and add a new crust, a new robe. The mountain is wearing hundreds of these robes.

The U.S. Geological Survey says the magma-node that became Mount Rainier — also known as taqʷuʔman, and many other Indigenous names — was born underground, but some version of what we see today has been around for 500,000 years. (It’s a young volcano.) Paleoanthropologists reckon our species appeared on Earth about 300,000 years ago. The United States of America announced itself 250 years ago.

On that day — July 4, 1776 — the mountain was not part of the U.S. It’s quite possible that Europeans, at that point pecking around the Northwest coast, hadn’t even seen it yet. Washington and its most iconic mountain didn’t join the union until 1889, 113 years later.

What will the land look like, from the mountain’s point of view, in 2276? Or 3076? Will what we call America still exist?

Maybe that’s a blasphemous question. But let’s be real. The mountain predates people. It has outlived every kingdom, government and empire that’s ever been.

And birthdays are an excellent time to contemplate one’s place in the big picture.

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Americans are not very happy with the big picture.

Over the past year, Pew Research Center has found that 59% of U.S. adults think the country’s best days are behind it, and 45% would prefer to live in the past.

Only 14% want to live in the future, with 40% preferring the present.

Statistically speaking, those looking to the future tend to be Black or Asian. Those looking to the past tend to be white or Hispanic. Backward-looking women didn’t want to go back too far. Most didn’t want to rewind more than 50 years.

Depending on your demographic, pining for the past comes with perils.

It has been 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, 163 years since the Emancipation Proclamation, 106 years since the 19th Amendment enshrined (mostly white) women’s suffrage, 83 years since the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, 61 years since the Voting Rights Act, 58 years since the Indian Civil Rights Act and Fair Housing Act, 11 years since the Supreme Court recognized same-sex marriage — the list goes on.

In 1970, Rep. Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, wrote: “I don’t measure America by its achievement but by its potential.”

That’s one story of America: We’re not there yet.

Here are some others: “All men are created equal” (the Declaration of Independence).

“Land of the free, home of the brave” (Francis Scott Key).

“At night, when the streets of your cities and villages shall be silent, and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not altogether powerless.” (Chief Seattle, Duwamish and Suquamish)

“We did not land on Plymouth Rock; Plymouth Rock landed on us.” (Malcolm X)

“The American dream is not a sprint, or even a marathon, but a relay.” (Julián Castro)

“Sadly, the American dream is dead. But if I get elected, I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before, and we will make America great again.” (Donald Trump)

Idealistic America. Transcendental America. Cruel America. Aspiring America.

It all seems true.

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Divided America is one of our favorite stories these days — one we keep telling and retelling.

The Pew research also found that 66% of U.S. adults think the country will be more divided by 2050, and 63% believe “their side” — whatever it may be — is “losing” on the most important political issues.

We’re losing the argument together. Or are we?

In a May interview with The New York Times, the big-ideas historian Yuval Noah Harari — probably best known for his bestselling, award-winning “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” — argued America is still broadly united by a foundational liberalism.

During the interview, he laid out four questions: Should people have the right to choose their government? Their profession? Their religion? Their spouse?

In the scope of human history, Harari said, the answers were frequently “no.” People tended to endure kings and emperors, family professions, sanctioned religions and arranged marriages. You got what you got.

“Now, I think even a majority of Trump voters would say yes to all these four questions,” Harari said. “The liberals and so-called conservatives are much closer than in any previous time in history.”

And yet: We feel divided and uneasy.

In his 1838 study of the U.S., Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville (one of the great diagnosticians of our national condition) argued that Americans are both blessed and cured by restlessness: “A man carefully builds a dwelling in which to pass his declining years and he sells it while the roof is being laid; he plants a garden and he rents it out just as he was going to taste its fruits.”

If he finds himself idle, he will travel “five hundred leagues in a few days in order to better distract himself from his happiness.”

Tocqueville thought this itch — born in Europe, nurtured in the New World — fed our obsession with westward expansion “to create vast domains in the distance.”

Of course, people all over the world are acutely aware of the basic fact: One group’s “expansion” is another’s “invasion.”

Roger Fernandes, a Lower Elwha S’Klallam artist and storyteller, has compared — and heard other Native educators compare — westward expansion to a zombie movie. “You have the walking dead, chasing people, just ravenous,” he said. “The humans are hiding, trying to survive, trying to find a safe haven. That sounds just like the Indian response to the settlers.”

For some, a “West” still calls, but it is up — beyond our atmosphere.

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America fetishizes freedom: It’s in the songs, mottos and movies.

But there’s still magma beneath the mountain. What of our freedom is still hidden, unseen and underground? How free are we?

In his “Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation,” James Baldwin — another of our great diagnosticians — writes about the stupidity and racism his nephew will face in the white-dominated world, and how to survive it.

One bell he keeps ringing, here and in a lot of his other work, is the deluded arrogance of white Americans thinking it is up to them to grant dignity and freedom to others — as if white Americans (whom he refers to as “your lost younger brothers”) held the keys to acceptance.

In fact, Baldwin told his nephew, it’s exactly the other way around.

“The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them,” he wrote. “You must accept them and accept them with love, for these innocent people have no other hope. They are in effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men.”

To live in a state of profound delusion — that is unfreedom.

“We with love shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it,” Baldwin concluded. “We cannot be free until they are free.”

Baldwin’s civics lesson begins with race but has a force that radiates in all directions. And our freedom and dignity, outer and inner, are just that: ours.

It seems so obvious, but so hard to practice.

We are contingent on us — all of us — and our freedom requires us to face reality, face our condition and the condition of one another, with scorching clarity.

Can we bear that responsibility? Can we bear that freedom? Are we a young volcano? What of us has not yet emerged?