So Close and Yet So Far

The internet is awash in posts, commemorating our 250^th Anniversary, July 4, 2026.  What harm can one more post do?

I remember when I first heard that this celebration was coming up.  Not any old July 4^th.  The semi quincentennial!  Such a tortured moniker for tortured times.  Semi, meaning half, of a quincentennial, or five-hundred-year anniversary. 

Perhaps measuring ourselves today against what we may be at the end of five hundred years may be a bit premature. Let’s get through the midterms, first.

These verbal gymnastics remind me of trying to learn French numbering, especially dates.  I will have the year 1986 emblazoned on my memory till I die, I expect.  Mille neuf cent quatre-vingt six.  One thousand, nine hundred four-twenties six.  Awkward.  No more awkward though, I suppose, than the German equivalent, with its weird reversals: Neunzehnhundert sechs-und-achtzig. Nineteen-hundred six and eighty. 

Sometimes we still see these archaic constructions in English.  Like “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie” or “Four score and seven years ago” (four score being the equivalent of quatre-vingt, as it happens.)  In our world today, we are learning to accept archaic constructions as a part of everyday life.  The planned White House Ballroom for example.  Or the United States T(ri)ump(hal) Arch, soon to grace the Potomac.

There are few things so archaic and yet so etched in our memories, as the words of the Declaration of Independence, whose ratification we celebrate today on the 4^th of July.  “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” The actual signing of the Declaration was apparently on July 2, 1776, and it forever perplexed John Adams, as to why we did not set off fireworks in perpetuity, two days before we do.

One other fact I love is that both Adams and Jefferson died on July 4^th of the same year, 1826, when the country turned fifty.  I was reminded of these facts, which I once knew, in the story beautifully told on a recent episode (7/2/2026) of the Substack of Jon Husman, called A Political Risk Analysis of the Glorious 4^th.  Although I suspect our politics are wildly different, I found the story riveting and moving, as he told of the various obstacles standing in the way of declaring independence, and the many factors that had to fall exactly into place to make the vote for independence happen as it did.

By the way, the book John Adams by David McCollough and the resultant miniseries on HBO with the great Paul Giamatti are among my favorite all-time book-movie pairings. I owe to them much of my understanding, paltry though it may be, of that period in American History. 

This sudden gush of patriotism that the 250^th Anniversary causes to well up in me is familiar.  While I homeschooled my two young boys (young men, now) I remember using various textbooks popular among homeschoolers, whose purpose was, at least in part, to instill that kind of gut instinct patriotism.  I remember reading lessons aloud and realizing that I had been taught the same story.  The perfection and exceptionalism of the American Experiment was as tightly wound in me as my tendons and arteries.  You could not extricate them if you wanted to.  I found myself tearing up at times, as a particularly patriotic chord was struck.  I don’t know whether it had that effect on my boys or not, but I, having lived and witnessed (through television) such horrors as 9/11 and such triumphs as the collapse of Berlin Wall, was and remain unabashed in my pride for my country.

Of course, the news, the actual events in the country, always tell a different story.  Our mythology and our actual history are two different things.  Today, I hear people condemn the Declaration and the Constitution for not immediately eradicating slavery, for not being prescient about women’s rights or the situation of Native people, vis-à-vis the invading colonists, now Americans.  It seems that those eighteenth century men, brilliant though they may have been, stubbornly remained captive to their own time, much as we seem to be, to ours.

Celebrating the 250^th reminds me of a younger me at the time of the 200^th or the Bicentennial, as it was called.  We had it easy, as far as that name goes.  I remember receiving somehow a copy of the Declaration of Independence, poster-sized, which I taped to the wall in the little window cubbyhole where my desk was, in the slope-roofed attic bedroom I shared with my younger sister.  We were living in SW Minneapolis and despite our house having the luxury of air conditioning, I remember the summers being brutally hot on the upper floor.  I remember admiring the florid script of the parchment document, being an inveterate doodler and drawer of words in various fonts and fantastical forms, long before the advent of the personal computer.

I don’t recall what we did for fireworks.  I don’t remember going anywhere to see them, though I do have generalized memories of going to the bandstand at Lake Harriett and getting ice cream and listening to brass bands.  I know we went swimming there, sometimes, and my friends and I bicycled all over the neighborhoods near us for hours on end, which is a kind of freedom few kids today enjoy. 

It’s hard to believe fifty years have passed since then, and both my parents have passed, too.  From the age of Watergate and Vietnam, we raced forward to the time of yuppies and New Wave.  In the next year or so, I would spend a month in Germany with a family and then, move to Florida in the dead of winter, as my older brother stayed in Minnesota for college.  I was the oldest, for a time, and enjoyed that freedom, along with my own room and a whole new place to re-establish my identity.

America is all about new beginnings.  Whether it is a child uprooting and leaving friends behind as she moves to a new and exciting place, or an immigrant leaving behind an entire culture and way of life to seek and hopefully find success here. 

We were daring enough to do something new, in the time of Adams and Jefferson.  It seems we are nearly always unafraid to do something new, our culture and traditions, ever fluid and malleable.  Sometimes, it frightens me, how fearlessly we bolt forward into the future, never stopping to consider the consequences.

In my twenties, after college in Florida, I went to Germany again and spent the Fourth of July evening on an army base in Wuerzburg, watching fireworks.  My year abroad was spent mostly in the International dorm, which held both Germans and International students from all around the world. 

With my sadly deficient German, I did my best to be understood, but there was no more welcoming community than the group of International students who matriculated with me and had to take the same basic German course to start classes in the fall.  They were going through what I was going through.  Excitement, confusion at the different ways of the culture, the different expectations for interaction with others, and of course, a little homesickness, or Heimweh.

Going to the base in July, after most of an academic year at the Uni Wuerzburg, was a little measure of comfort, of familiarity.  The wonderful women who sponsored my scholarship also helped me obtain rare items of food, like taco seasoning and brownie mix, staples of our life in the States.  You do not realize how much you miss the tastes of home until you have experienced a vinegar salad in a school cafeteria.

Of course, Germany is not so very different from the US.  Many people come to the US and experience a much greater degree of culture shock than I ever felt, during my short stint in Germany.  And yet they persist, adapt, find ways of coping.  Because they want to stay.

This past week of Supreme Court rulings, has been jaw-dropping.  First, striking down temporary protective status such as Haitians enjoyed after their terrible earthquake, or Cubans, fleeing from Castro.  Then, barely acknowledging that indeed, people born in the US are citizens, as our Constitution rather strongly implies. 

I feel kind of like a person on a planet with gravity who goes up into space, only to observe, that now that she has left, gravity no longer applies on the planet, anymore.  Things that I believed that I learned in law school as immutable fact seem to have vanished in a mysterious cloud of MAGA.

Here we are, celebrating our 250^th, but how many of us are feeling that uplifting surge of patriotism so many felt in 1976?  If you are old enough, think of how you felt when the Berlin Wall fell in 1990.  Or when Osama Bin Laden was apprehended and killed.  If you are older still, think of the Moon Landing or of the day Nixon left office in a helicopter, reviled by his country. Days, when the American Way seemed to have prevailed.

I hope we will feel that way again, and I expect we shall.  Just wait till the Tricentennial, fifty years from now.  If the country is at all recognizable then, I expect those of us left alive will have a roaring good time.  I expect all those mysterious vanishing rights will have been restored, if not enhanced and broadened, and that gravity and the rule of law will once again rule the Earth, and the name of the United States will be sullied no more. 

Of course, whether that happens or not depends entirely on you and me.

Happy Fourth!

For another patriotic essay read Eighty Years about our vets and the Battle of Normandy.