By Ande Jacobson
We are quickly approaching the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. That should be cause for celebration. 250 years ago, the fledgling colonies did something momentous. They threw off the bonds of tyranny and royal rule and emphatically declared that they were to be self-governing. They weren’t without discord, but together they wanted something different from whence they came.
I was in high school when our country celebrated the 200th anniversary of the nation’s founding in 1976. I vividly remember the festive mood that encompassed the nation. We still hadn’t fully achieved the goals laid out in the Declaration of Independence, but we had made great strides toward them despite still having quite a way to go. In the spring of that year, I participated in a massive, district-wide Revolutionary War reenactment. Participation was voluntary, but most of the students from the six schools that comprised our district at that time were game. The district brought in soldiers from nearby Fort Ord to act as monitors for the event which gave it a certain gravitas. We were split into the British and the Colonists (I started the day on the side of the British to play Hail Britannia on my trumpet, then I switched to be one of the Colonists in the battle that took place along the railroad tracks spanning three cities in our district). Along the way, I tripped over a log and twisted my ankle, so I was pulled out as injured, and I spent the rest of the battle talking with one of the soldiers as he helped me back to my car. He later sent me a picture and a letter, but that’s an entirely different story.
There were numerous other celebrations throughout the year, and there was also a sense of national pride and hope for the future. It was an exciting time.
While I’ve never been a fireworks fan because I have sensitive ears and don’t like explosions, over the years I’ve participated in various Independence Day celebrations, usually musically playing in concert bands at civic events that marked each passing year with patriotic music, good food, good friends, and happy memories. It’s been quite some time now since I’ve played in one of those celebrations, but I still have fond memories of many of them from years past.
Now as we are at the 250 mark, things are different. It’s not at all how I envisioned things would be through my youthful eyes in 1976. I thought that our forward progress would largely continue and that we might even have seen one or more women become president by now. We do have women in places unheard of in 1976. After all, the first female Supreme Court Justice was nominated and confirmed in 1981, just five years after our nation hit the 200 mark, and several others have served on that auspicious bench since then. We’ve even recently had a female Vice President, and before that a black President, so there had been significant progress toward the goal where everyone has a chance at achieving their dreams.
Unfortunately, we’ve also recently taken some giant steps backward to the point where people are now being penalized or harmed up to and including losing their lives at the hands of our current government for nothing more than exercising a Constitutionally guaranteed right to air their grievances. In light of the current situation in our country, it’s difficult to celebrate the nation as a good thing and a positive influence in the world. Because of the current administration and the takeover of a major political party by ideologues bent on undoing much of the progress that the nation has made, the national mood isn’t celebratory but is instead fractured and fearful. Rather than seeing everyone as equal and working toward giving everyone a fair chance, rights are being taken away, and people are being punished for who they are and what they think.
Celebrating 250 years since the founding of the United States should be something festive and hopeful like it was when we celebrated 200 years back in 1976. While there have always been differing views on US policy and how we should solve the problems we face in the world, most of those disputes centered on how best to implement solutions that would help the majority of people. Now, those disputes are ideological pitting the current day robber barons and patriarchal/racial ideologues who form a very wealthy, small minority against the vast majority who want everyone to have a fair shot at a happy and successful life.
History is never a straight line, and often after positive achievement, there is pushback and regression, but the general trajectory had been largely positive until recently. Even with positive achievements though, they are sometimes flawed. Watergate provides an illustrative example.
I was fortunate to have studied Watergate in school as it was happening. It made Civics exciting and relevant. It also made me understand how important it was to vote and to do so responsibly. That’s where the people, i.e., the governed, have the biggest say in how we consent to our government. Once it was clear what President Nixon had done to get an unfair advantage in an election, it created a national crisis. Members of both parties sought to impeach him, and had the impeachment completed, he would have been impeached, convicted, removed, and then faced criminal charges in a court of law showing that nobody was above the law, not even a president. Instead of facing such a major disgrace, at the urging of his party Nixon resigned the presidency before the impeachment vote was taken. That was a positive result. Congress did its job of oversight when it was clear that the president had grossly overstepped his authority.
Unfortunately what followed was less positive. Once Vice President Ford assumed the presidency, he pardoned Nixon because he thought that was the way for the country to heal from the serious damage that had been done. Sadly, that meant that while Nixon’s presidency ended, he never faced formal or criminal accountability for his actions, and that emboldened what had been a fringe group of ideologues to skirt the law down the line. In fact, had Ford never pardoned Nixon, and had Nixon faced accountability in a court of law for his actions, we may never have gotten to where we are today with ideologues running the Executive Branch of the federal government along with enablers on the Supreme Court and in Congress working to disassemble our democracy from the inside.
As the nation reaches 250 years of existence, much of that time as a world leader, instead the country is now largely shunned by the rest of the world’s democracies. In a few short years (i.e., Trump’s first term and less than two years into his second), we have shown the world that we are not a reliable ally, and we are instead to be worked around and avoided. Worse, we have shown the world that we can do real damage not only to ourselves but to every modern nation. We have made the world far less stable and more predatory for everyone.
As an illustration of just how far we’ve fallen, a few days ago, the current Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, gave a speech where he dismissed Watergate as something that wouldn’t even be newsworthy today. It was a major crisis when it happened, yet now as bad as it was (and it was bad), it pales in comparison to the brazen, unchecked illegal actions being taken by our current administration. While he clearly didn’t mean it in that context, that is the message that we should take from his comments, and we have to do our part to stop this madness.
Still, there is hope. The vast majority of Americans do not support what is happening, and we have a major election this fall. If enough of the ideologues can be purged from Congress, we can stop the current administration from its illegal and unconstitutional actions and start repairing the damage it has done. While time will tell if we can once again start moving on a positive trajectory toward the goals our nation’s founders laid out, if the people get their say, it’s likely that it will happen. It will just take time and effort.
Happy 250 to us. Although I won’t be around then, it makes me wonder what the nation will be like at 300.
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