Before America 250, we had America 200

As America’s third century dawned on July 4, 1976, this nation was in desperate need of something to celebrate.

Eleven months earlier, we had witnessed the first presidential resignation in our history.

It had been barely a year since the April 29, 1975, iconic photo of a Bell helicopter sitting atop the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon as an American CIA officer assisted evacuees up the ladder from the lower roof below.

As Americans watched in real time as Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese, they were brutally reminded of the over 58,000 souls lost in a war never won. A war without reason, a war defined by just one word: Why?

It would take another three decades before the answer would finally come.

That then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara withheld from President Johnson the field retraction cable from the task force commander shedding doubt on a second North Vietnamese attack on the USS Maddox. An attack that Johnson used to make a televised address to the nation on August 4^th, 1964, and convince Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving him the green light to send U.S. troops.

A resolution so loosely worded that it was nothing more than a blank check for death.

One weasel of a man, one despicable act of betrayal to his President and the Constitution he was sworn to uphold was responsible for a war that defined a generation.

Americans of 1976 also had in their recent memory the bombings of the New York City Police Department Headquarters (1970), the Capitol Building (1971), Pentagon (1972), California Attorney General’s Office (1974) and the U.S. State Department (1975).

But not all news was bad news.

While the effects of the ’73 OPEC oil embargo still lingered, the overall economy provided hope. GDP growth was above 6%, inflation was down to 5.8% from the double-digit highs of ’74, and household income was on the rise.

Unemployment was still too high (averaging 7.7%) but lower than ’75 with a downward trend for the future.

America 200 could have focused on the negatives, but we chose not to. Instead, we came together in one massive celebration of national unity.

We understood that for all the turmoil of recent years, it was but one chapter in a book of many.

A book of good and bad. Our book, filled with our stories. A book started two centuries ago and, short of the Bible, still sitting atop all others.

And in this columnist’s opinion, there were two reasons for it.

First, the internet was still a closed network in a government funded research project. Social media was face to face at the grocery store, church socials, school programs and town meetings.

Allow the simple Christmas card to provide some valuable insight.

A social psychology experiment by researchers Phillip Kunz and Michael Woolcatt at Brigham Young University sheds light on society of the day. The two mailed hundreds of handwritten Christmas cards, complete with family photos, to hundreds of total strangers. Much to their amazement, 20% of those strangers sent a card back!

And when Kunz repeated the experiment in 2000, the 20% still held. Yet when psychologist Brian Meier replicated it in 2015 the response had fallen to a dismal 2%.

The digital age had fully arrived and our great national disconnect had begun.

On one hand, a treasure trove of history, literature, and the arts, available to anyone with an internet connection. On the other hand, a cesspool of envy, jealousy, oppressed vs oppressor, everyone’s a victim of someone or something. A hand that uses the hammer of hate to pound into young minds that America is not to be celebrated but reviled.

The second factor, (and in this columnist’s opinion, the most important) that America 200 had going for it was that of our total population at the time (roughly 218 million), over half of that population (128 million) were either adults who had personal experiences and memories of the Great Depression and World War II or were the children of that generation who learned of those years first-hand from the parents and grandparents who lived them.

Those years were real “hard times”, those were years with real danger to our freedom.

We can’t go back to 1776, but we can go back to 1976.

Currently, there are roughly 81 million Americans over the age of 60. That’s 81 million of us old enough to pass down where we were, what we saw, what we lived.

Please, don’t leave our younger Americans to the manipulation of the internet. Talk to them, let them ask questions, hear them, answer them. Give them the benefit of what we had: face to face conversation.

Even if they’re a bit hesitant, do it anyway.

Trust me, the time will come when we’re long gone that they’ll have those days when a smile forms, the heart fills, and they’ll remember.

And they’ll thank you for giving them their own memories. Memories of when you gave them the greatest gift of all: your time.

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