Craig Furbush lives in Portland.

There’s a funny connection between numbers and history in our personal lives. We celebrate the passing of variables of five years, like 10, 25, 50 or 100 years, and so on. There’s no obvious reason for that. Maybe it’s just a base 10 thing.

So, thanks to the signing of the Declaration of Independence in July of 1776, we’re about to begin celebrating America’s 250th “birthday.” There’ll be the usual parades and fireworks this summer, I’m sure, and maybe a garish new monument in D.C. and a UFC match on the White House grounds.

But I would argue that America’s 250th birthday celebration has already begun, and in Minneapolis. The recent events there have been like Lexington and Concord to me. A small but determined group of Americans have decided that their liberty and freedoms are under attack, and they are determined to do whatever they can to defend those principles, even in the bitter cold. Like the first American patriots, they are opposing one of the world’s great powers, in this case the private army of their own president, and they will not be silenced.

Sadly, as in the Boston Massacre of 1770, lives have been lost, but the people of Minneapolis most likely knew the stakes and yet were still willing to put themselves in harm’s way to risk paying the price for freedom.

It’s pretty likely that these new American patriots will succeed, too, for a couple of reasons. First, although the persecution of certain people or groups in America is as much a part of our history as the progress we’ve made, widespread legal oppression has always had a shelf life here.

Just read the Declaration that we’ll be celebrating this summer, or the Constitution, which people in political office or in the service have sworn to support and defend. Americans have really been trying to create a “more perfect union” since 1776.

So many of us — Blacks, women, Jews, the Irish and Italians, anyone LGBTQ, the West Coast Asians in the 1940s, the list goes on — all have survived eras, centuries even, when their status as American citizens was routinely denigrated, even by more famous Americans like Henry Ford whom we consider architects of American life.

I’d like to include all Native Americans in that list, too, by the way, but I’m not sure we can ever really ever atone for our national greed for what they can rightly call their ancestral homelands.

So now it’s the so-called illegal immigrants’ turn. Not just the criminals, either, but the people who have been our reliable co-workers and neighbors. But the patriotic citizens of Minneapolis won’t have it, because they understand that forcibly threatening anybody’s freedom in America threatens their own.

The other reason I believe this cruelty won’t last is because we — well, most of us — are not raising our children to hate and fear other people. In fact, just the opposite is happening. Young people today are far more comfortable with and less judgmental about personal differences than the adults — and the grandparents — who raised them.

Here’s one example. At the middle school my granddaughter attends, there’s a single-stall bathroom in one of the main halls of the building whose door reads, “Anybody’s Bathroom.” That’s about right, I thought to myself when I first saw it. That’s the future.

Some politicians and commentators have said we won’t have a country anymore if we don’t persecute illegal immigrants. I doubt that. Rather, we won’t have a country anymore if we stop celebrating our rights as Americans to stand up for liberty.

So here’s to America’s 250th birthday and the somewhat premature and courageous celebration of it, thanks to the brave reenactors in Minneapolis.