1. What are your memories of the bicentennial, for all you oldsters?
In our little town, I was 12 years old and remember the town going all out. a big festival, a parade. My dad and a number of his friends all grew big fuzzy beards. Folks sewed their own colonial clothes and wore them around town. It was also Colorado’s 100th birthday, and the overlap of the two anniversaries turned into a big to-do.
2. What would the Founding Fathers think about where this nation we created has ended up today?
Jefferson and Madison, for certain, would be livid. Hamilton was a very progressive thinker as well. As an immigrant from the West Indies and of mixed race, he would be proud of the end of slavery but angry about the banking and health care systems of the present day. Jefferson was a pretty progressive libertarian as well and would be so frustrated with the hyper-regulated state. Madison would just be smacking his forehead at all the misinterpretations of the Constitution he authored.
3. What might this nation look like in another 50 years?
With the overconsumption of resources, big tech, AI, and the widespread numbing of the population’s intelligence, I think the future could be pretty bleak. The young folk need to put down the video game controllers and get involved.
4. Sure, Trump and the leaders today are terrible, but where did this all go wrong?
Reagan and New Gingrich. They are patients Zero.
5. What’s a good quote to consider this weekend during our country’s 250th anniversary?
“He [the King of Great Britain] has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us: For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States.
– Thomas Jefferson, from that long thing he wrote that one time.
1) I was too young to remember it but I had this really cool ‘76 t shirt with the stars & stripes.
2) I think they’d be outraged at the level of self promotion, greed and corruption in all of our political figures. Several might even challenge them to a duel.
3) You’ve seen idiocracy? Some version of that.
4) Nixon began the slide, Reagan greased the slide and accelerated the decline.
5) Someone somewhere in the US is totally unaware this was their last week with all ten fingers.
Roy’s recollection of the bicentennial made me pause–if for no other reason than because I vividly recall that NOTHING happened in Craig that day. There were supposed to be fireworks, but they were postponed due to weather. I remember spending the day riding my bicycle up and down the streets by myself, horribly bored.
For some reason, the parade in Craig was on July 17, to coincide with the Rodeo (and really it was meant to be a year long observance). And indeed it was very long, and patriotic and small town-y. Even the John Birch Society had a float. They did it again in 1977, and that was the last time the town ever did a big celebration of the 4th.
1) I, too, lived in a small town (Morrison, pop. 413) and we had a small town fair, the street was closed, I wore my cub scout uniform and I do believe fireworks were lit by me for fun. All in all, a good memory.
2) The lack of empathy mixed with a massive ignorance of what it means to be a member of a democratically governed society would make them go quickly insane with how they made a functional democracy and the people are letting it slip away.
3) Climate wars and climate migration will be the main conflict points around the globe.
4) I have been paying attention since Bush 1 and our country has been a functioning dysfunctional democratic republic with good and bad and all the in-between, but then the dwindling white male majority was being pushed further into the corner and as any anggry cornered animal will do, Trump term 1 was the start of the vicious fight to keep the demographic power shift away from them to a more diverse population.
5) “It could be worse, it could be raining.” Marty Feldman, Young Frankenstein