By Reggie Castro
Editor’s note: This essay placed third among 1,043 entries in the 2026 Ninth Circuit Civics Contest, the first circuit-level placement by a student from the Northern Mariana Islands. Reggie Castro is a graduating senior at Marianas High School. The essay is published as it appears in the contest’s official publication, with citations omitted.
I was born in Saipan — a small island in the Western Pacific, technically American soil — but I grew up in the Philippines. I spent my childhood watching America from a distance. There, America was not a place so much as a feeling — alive in the stories adults told in hushed, reverent voices. The United States, they said, was a land where things were truly possible, where what you worked for mattered more than where you came from. I had a birth certificate that said I belonged there, but the America I knew was built from imagination.
And yet, even from afar, I could sense the gap between promise and reality. Saipan is part of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands — a U.S. territory whose residents are American nationals who serve in the military under the American flag, but cannot vote for President and have no voting representation in Congress. The community I was born into held a version of American citizenship that was, in quiet but profound ways, incomplete. The Pursuit of Happiness was a birthright on my documents — but for many there, the democracy meant to protect it remained out of reach.
Then, in ninth grade, I came back — not just to study, but to understand what lay beyond the American Dream. In my first year back, I visited Washington, D.C. Standing before the monuments, I felt something unexpected: not awe, but recognition. This country was not finished. It was still being written — argued over, fought for, revised. A nation in the middle of becoming something. And at the center of that becoming was a phrase I had heard all my life without fully understanding: the Pursuit of Happiness.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote those words into the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he was making a philosophical claim as much as a political one. For centuries, happiness had been the exclusive province of the powerful — your station determined by bloodline, title, the country that claimed you. Enlightenment thinkers, particularly John Locke, challenged this: rights were not granted by rulers but inherent to every human being by nature. Jefferson enshrined this in the Declaration, proclaiming that among the unalienable rights endowed by the Creator was not happiness itself, but the pursuit of it. The distinction is everything. The Founders did not promise equal outcomes. They promised every person an equal chance to try.
That idea was dangerous enough to start a revolution. A monarchy has no room for citizens who believe their lives belong to themselves. The Pursuit of Happiness was a direct challenge to inherited power — and remains one of the most radical ideas in history.
Coming back as a teenager — crossing from the Philippines to a mainland I had only ever imagined — I expected to recognize the country I had believed in my whole life. I did not. The culture moved differently, the unspoken rules of belonging were entirely new to me. Back in the Philippines, community was everything — you moved through life surrounded by family and familiarity. Here, I had to rebuild my sense of self in a place that felt both like mine and completely foreign. For a while, I wondered if I had been wrong — if the dream I had carried across the Pacific was just that: a dream.
But those moments of doubt taught me something essential. The Pursuit of Happiness is not a guarantee — it is a framework that demands participation. It asks something of you. Coming from a place where many people never get the chance to chase their dreams at all, I saw with fresh eyes what America actually offers: not certainty, but possibility. Not a destination, but an open road.
That road, I also came to see, is not equally open to everyone. In D.C., I stood before monuments built by people whose own right to pursue happiness was legally denied for generations. I read the words carved into marble — freedom, equality, justice — and felt the weight of how long it took for those words to begin to include everyone. I walked through a city where the distance between those with opportunity and those without was measured in just a few blocks. The promise of 1776 and the reality of today are not the same — and pretending otherwise dishonors the ideals this country was founded on.
As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, protecting the Pursuit of Happiness must mean more than celebrating it in speeches. It means building conditions that make the pursuit genuinely possible for every person — investing in schools so a student’s zip code doesn’t determine their ceiling, and creating access to mental health resources and civic education so no one is left behind before the race even starts. And it means confronting an uncomfortable truth: that right now, hundreds of thousands of Americans in U.S. territories like Saipan — people who serve in the military under the American flag — are still denied a presidential vote. If the Pursuit of Happiness means anything, it must mean no American’s voice goes uncounted. That is not a political question. It is a moral one.
Every generation must ask honestly whether the America of today is worthy of the Declaration that founded it — and then do the work of closing the distance.
I came back carrying a version of America built in my imagination across the Pacific. What I found was different — messier and more demanding than the dream I had grown up with. But also more alive. More honest. More worth fighting for. I found a nation still in pursuit — of justice, of equality, of its own highest ideals — and realized the gap between promise and reality was not a reason for disappointment. It was a reason to stay, to participate, to try.
That, I think, is exactly what the Founders intended. The Pursuit of Happiness was never meant to be easy, or finished, or guaranteed. It was meant to be worth fighting for.
Two hundred and fifty years later, it still is.
Editor’s note: The views and opinions expressed in this op-ed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of NMI News Service or its staff. All assertions are the sole responsibility of the writer. To submit an op-ed for consideration, email your piece to brad.ruszala@nminewsservice.com.