As of today, Independence Day , we as a nation have three years to get ourselves together.

Three years from today, the United States will celebrate its semiquincentennial . (If you prefer a shorter word for the 250th birthday, the sestercentennial will do.) Yet patriotism, of the right and salutary kind, is disturbingly attenuated. Gallup reports that from 2004 until now, the number of us who say they are either extremely or very proud to be Americans has dropped from 91% to 67%, which is very near the record low.

Similarly and somewhat relatedly, “confidence” in the United States government has fallen all the way to 31%, also a record low.

This decline in national pride isn’t merely a somewhat worrisome trend. At least for those of us who remember the massive bicentennial celebration in 1976, the current state of affairs is a tragedy.

For 21 full months, official celebrations ramped up to the July 4, 1776, climax. In April 1975 was the 200th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord — “Here once the embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard round the world ” — and in June were commemorations of the remarkable colonial stand at Bunker (and Breed’s) Hill. In January, it seemed everyone in the country re-read Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (published on Jan. 10, 1776), imbibing its justifiable conceit that “ the cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”

And so on, right until the glorious, joyous, nationwide eruption of awe-filled pride on the day of the bicentennial itself.

Please allow me to get personal here. The bicentennial was one of the seminal events of my life. I was 12 then, just old enough to start really appreciating the history of the nation’s founding and the ideals of ordered liberty and to recognize it as a wonderfully rare and massive advance in human thriving and human rights. The heady sense of, the inspirational emotion of, a “cause greater than self,” and a good and righteous one at that, was profound.

So motivated was I, so enraptured, that I determined then and there that I would live to be 112, making it my mission to help these United States realize a tricentennial celebration just as well merited as a bicentennial. (12-year-olds, of course, think they can determine such things by force of will.)

Clearly, I wasn’t alone in these sentiments. Some years later, my college classmate and now-fellow conservative columnist Deroy Murdock told me he had made the exact same vow in 1976, for the self-same reasons. And they were indeed “reasons,” not just jingoistic passions. What was wrought by our Founding Fathers, both the famous Washington-Jefferson-Franklins and the now-anonymous enlistees who crossed the Delaware, survived Valley Forge, and triumphed at Yorktown, was emphatically and revolutionarily good and conducive to human progress.

In 1976, even after a horrid decade-plus of assassinations, race riots, a lost war in Vietnam, unspeakable inflation, and a first-ever presidential resignation, we Americans almost universally deeply understood all this, felt it in our marrows.

In the 47 years since then, we’ve come so much farther still. We defeated an evil, expansionist empire without firing a shot; we transcended unspeakable jihadist terrorism; we spread freedom and charity throughout the globe; and, yes, we significantly turned racism and its attendant ills into vestigial rather than still-regnant pathologies.

The United States of America was a great country then, and we are even better now. Yet now, with far greater wealth and far less crime and far more tolerance and, yes, a relatively safer world, we see and hear too many of our fellow Americans as soured, embittered, and angry.

And now, a third of us aren’t even “very” proud to be Americans. Because I’m a civic beneficiary of what was known as the Spirit of ’76, it’s enough to make me too frequently want to look at the anti-patriots and ask, perhaps uncharitably, “What’s wrong with you?” Where, pray tell, is the gratitude for blessings that are even more abundant now than they were 47 years ago?

In the next three years, we as a people must rediscover that gratitude. Reinstill the justifiable pride. Commit ourselves anew to living up to the highest ideals of, rather than obsessing about the human flaws of, those who began this American experiment.

God has blessed America. We should rejoice and be glad in it — and, too, be worthy of it.