The World Cup is kicking off here in the United States and for the next five weeks, a sport most Americans cannot be bothered to watch will bring the rest of the planet to our doorstep. They are already arriving. Germans, Spaniards, Egyptians, Australians, every continent but Antarctica is showing up and something is happening that ought to make us pause. Their minds are being blown away by us.

A German named Freddy came to Atlanta and made his way up to North Georgia, went tubing on the Chattahoochee, drove through Chattanooga and on to Auburn, Ala. He has been tweeting it all home in stunned, joyful disbelief. Auburn’s eagle flies around the stadium. There was a military flyover — he had never seen one. At sunset over the stadium, he wrote that the European mind cannot comprehend the moment. He and his friends went to a Buc-ee’s at one in the morning, bought brisket sandwiches and Beaver Nuggets, and ate them sitting on a pile of bagged deer corn. He is having the time of his life.

A man from Spain stood at the rim of the Grand Canyon and wept. Another couple could not believe Memphis has a pyramid. Visitors stood slack-jawed at the ducks marching through the Peabody and at the width of the Mississippi, a river that makes the Thames look like a drainage ditch. A young woman drove across Indiana and could not get over the size of the houses — the houses of people we would call poor. And she is not wrong to be amazed: the poorest state in America, Miss., now posts a median income that outpaces much of Western Europe.

Think about the asymmetry. We fly to Spain to see cathedrals and to Rome to stand among ruins two thousand years older than our republic. We assume the old world holds the wonders. Here are the people of the old world, crossing an ocean and crying at our canyon, marveling at Memphis, a city we just sent the National Guard to help. They look at what we walk past every day and cannot believe their luck at getting to see it.

Now look at us.

We are weeks from our 250th birthday, and we are spending the run-up like a country in a midlife crisis. We talk about a “national divorce” as if we could simply cut the cord and walk away — as if the heartland of California weren’t ruby red and the cities of the reddest states weren’t deep blue, as if we weren’t all hopelessly, beautifully intermarried. We have decided that political disagreement is grounds to call one another evil. We marinate online in our own outrage, believing the worst about our neighbors because a screen confirmed it, passing around lies because the lie flatters what we already wanted to think. We go looking for America at its worst, and the algorithm is happy to oblige.

The strangers at our door are finding America at its best. One group of fans reached their hotel in the rain with no way to the stadium and no public transit in sight. The receptionist put them in her own car and drove them to the game. That is not a marketing campaign. That is just an American being an American.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, 56 men signed their names to a document that pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to forge this nation. Some went bankrupt. Some watched their property seized and their children buried. They staked everything so that we could inherit a country so abundant, so free, and so safe that we now have the luxury of despising one another over politics from the comfort of our phones.

Maybe the foreigners have it right. Maybe the eagle and the flyover and the canyon and the kindness of a stranger with car keys really are worth crossing an ocean to see. Maybe, watching them fall in love with the place we take for granted, we could fall in love with it again ourselves and decide to be a little more charitable to the neighbor God told us to love, even when we cannot stand how he votes.

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