America at 250: Let’s not forget what motivated us to do what we did back in 1776

Two hundred fifty years ago today, July 4, 1776, we were already more than a year into being insurgents, and a long seven years away from actually achieving the independence that we were set to formally declare.

And in the face of the jingoism of the current times, understand, we didn’t do it on our own, far from it – France provided seed money, troops, weapons, warships; Spain also gave us money, opened up another front of the war on the Gulf Coast, and funded the decisive Battle of Yorktown.

If this at all feels familiar, think: Ukraine, which is doing a better than fair job defending its homeland from the four-years-and-counting Russian invasion, with help from the EU and the U.S.

The way our Continental Army fought the Revolutionary War feels to me like Ukraine, and also, dare I say it – of course I dare – how Iran is fighting its side of the current war it is in with the U.S. and Israel.

Facing vastly superior forces and firepower on the other side, the aim of the insurgent isn’t to win so much as to survive, and you do that by using the other side’s superiorities against them – making it a war of attrition, hitting and running, draining the other side’s resources, sapping their will.

It’s not hard for me to see a straight line from our Continental Army’s guerilla war tactics to the use of inexpensive drones (the bulk costing less than $6,000, some coming in as cheap as $400) by both Ukrainians and Iranians to counter U.S. Tomahawks ($3.5 million per) and Russian cruise missiles ($6 million per).

Switching gears, it’s also hard to not see how we’ve moved on from being the insurgents to being the colonials.

The current administration has already seized the assets of one vanquished country (oil-rich Venezuela), and the Trump regime has made it clear that it has its eyes on Iran’s oil wealth – while also targeting for expansion, of all places on the globe, Greenland, the vast island in the North Atlantic, because the Trump folks are convinced they can make money mining rare earth minerals there.

To be fair to Team Trump, this current run of us being colonizers by far isn’t something new in our history – we’ve been carving out territory since before we were our own country, taking land first from Natives, before taking the Southwest by force from Mexico, expanding our sphere of influence south into Central and South America, west into the Pacific rim.

We did all of this in the name of liberty and democracy while, at the same time, also allowing Southerners to force African Americans into slave labor, then upon emancipation, subjugating them economically, politically and culturally for another 100 years through Jim Crow; and rendering women into being second-class citizens, for the first 133 years of our constitutional history not even allowed to vote, and today, on what we mark as our nation’s 250th birthday, still not in control of their own health decisions.

Which is to say, we’re not there yet – where those of us who were in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, gathering to vote to approve the Declaration of Independence, marking the line in the sand, no turning back, we’re doing this, might have assumed we would be, if they could have imagined on that day that there’d be a United States of America 250 long years later.

Central to the occasion of this day, their hearts, and heads, were in the right place, and I’d like to believe that, while far from perfect, we’ve been making progress across the generations toward being the more perfect union that has been the goal from the get go.

I even see it now, with the fighting spirit of those of us fighting back against the current political direction, which can feel at times to be unique to our times, but when you look at our history, is anything but.

We’ve overcome a lot to get to 250 – first the Redcoats, then a civil war, external threats from national socialism and state communism, and today the ongoing decade-long internal threat from a politically quite formidable oligarchy.

I’ll use an analogy from a uniquely American game, football, to describe how we’ve made it this far – our progress is not so much big plays as it is keeping the chains moving, moving the ball down the field, getting first downs.

That’s how our country came into being in the first place, beginning 250 years ago today, with the first play of the drive being telling the Brits, It’s on.