Imagining the commemoration of America’s 250th Anniversary brings many historic images to mind: our revolution, the Constitution, a great victory over tyranny, the Star Spangled Banner, and freedom for a new nation. The vastness of our nation is beyond comprehension, including the great prairies of the Midwest, the snow-capped mountains of the Rockies, old-growth forests in our Northwest, thousands of miles of beautiful shoreline on the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf Coasts, the great Mississippi River, and desert landscapes of our Southwest. Finally, our people from all over the world, a mix of cultures, languages, religions, traditions, dance, music, and, of course, the varieties of food. These are the images that come to mind.
The words from the song America The Beautiful: amber waves of grain, purple mountains majesty, god shed his grace on thee, brotherhood from sea to shining sea. In my 1964 second-grade class, the teacher put a record on our classroom phonograph. The song, which repeatedly played the phrase “America was the melting pot,” has stayed with me to this day. Some 60 years later, many have forgotten that we are the only nation on earth comprised mostly of immigrants, while remembering our cherished native inhabitants as the first Americans who have a great reverence for all living things and the land itself.
How should we celebrate the occasion that King Charles III mentioned during his recent address to a Joint Session of Congress, our semiquincentennial? We must pay homage to the past, both positive and negative, never forgetting those who’ve fallen in battle during our War of Independence, our Civil War that ended slavery, and in defense of freedom abroad in two world wars and other undeclared wars. We must also remember those who fought and died for basic freedoms within our nation during the Civil Rights movement. We are not a perfect nation.
The great documentarian, Ken Burns, brought the Revolutionary War to life in his recent PBS series. The documentary went well beyond what most high school students learned in history classes to reveal the gruesome details of our independence, the bravery of the colonists, and the heroism of our founding fathers who risked hanging for treason against the Crown. One lesson from the early days of our nation is that freedom isn’t free. There was and is a cost in human blood. We often forget and must pay again, forgetting the lessons of the past.
President Trump could have reversed his recent course of institutional destruction, the flouting of longstanding traditions, the attacks on free speech, and freedom of the press in an effort to increase executive power. Wouldn’t this anniversary be the perfect time to bring the nation together from our recent strife of mass deportations, Americans shot in the street by federal agents, and his own assassination attempts? He could have celebrated how far we’ve come as a nation with basic freedoms, technology, having the world’s strongest economy, and America being a beacon of democracy in a troubled world, but that is not his style.
Instead, the White House will be turned into a celebration of what looks more like a throwback to the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome, where citizens cheered on the combatants in a death match. The plan is for multiple UFC fighters with cauliflower ears and battle scars to beat each other senseless until one is either knocked unconscious or unable to continue due to physical injuries.
The chosen phrases of the day are Warrior Ethos, Maximum Lethality, and No Quarter for our enemies with god on our side. The MAGA and Trump mentality is a zero-sum game where compromise and bipartisanship are the enemy. “I must win, and you must lose.” Winning is all that matters.
A vile vision of what it is to be a man has taken hold, where brute force, power, and violence are celebrated as somehow macho instead of being a good husband and father. Our young men have, unfortunately, bought into this vision, with many Gen Z males voting for Trump in 2024.
Rather than a celebration of America as the melting pot, the signal to the nation and the world is that the welcome mat is gone. Immigrants are labelled as vermin, with poisoned blood, murderers, rapists, and drug dealers. This is the implied message that this administration seeks to communicate.
America First has morphed into America Alone as the rallying cry, with cruelty, fear, pain, and suffering as the tool of choice to stop the flow of people from what Trump calls “Shit hole” nations and to rid the nation of those who are here illegally, regardless of their many contributions to our economy and our intellectual brain trust. Their presence is an addition to this nation, not a drain.
America alone is an America in decline, isolated, shunned, a pariah nation with few friends, many foes, and left behind while the rest of the world moves on, realizing that “We” is a far stronger word than “I”.
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