Un-Happy Birthday, USA: It’s hard to celebrate an America in regress

I was 4 years old the summer of the 1976 bicentennial, and because of that, I don’t remember all that much about it.

The Statler Brothers July 4 show was still in its early years in 1976.

I remember the fireworks.

My hazy memories of the summer of ’76 are: it was an exciting time!

I grew into being a history buff, and as such, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence should feel like a big deal.

So, why does it not?

Just feels to me like, the America that we should want to celebrate feels helplessly broken, and that we did it to ourselves.

And that it’s all a lie.

And no, it’s not Donald Trump, though he’s certainly a part of the immediate problem.

But I don’t even want to blame him just for being successful at exploiting the latent undercurrent of racial, gender and sexual orientation prejudice that he was able to ride to political and economic power.

Frankly, he’s not that bright, but would-be fascist thugs don’t have to be.

It now seems naïve, but I distinctly remember thinking, circa 2015, Year 7 of the Obama era, as the U.S. Supreme Court was declaring a fundamental right for gays and lesbians to marry, man, we’re finally living up to what they got all puffed up about in the 18th century about all men being created equal.

I mean, it took forever – people could still be owned as slaves until the end of the Civil War, women didn’t get the right to vote until 1920, the effective extension of slavery via Jim Crow didn’t come to an end until the early 1970s, in some places in the Deep South.

But here we were, in 2015, Year 7 of the era of the first Black president, with things seeming to be lining up toward us electing our first woman president a year hence, recognizing same-sex relationships as official policy.

Wow, right?

In 2026, Year 250 of the American experiment, it feels like we’re back to where we were in the early years of post-Civil War Reconstruction – or more to the point, like we’d never really advanced past where we were in the Reconstruction era.

The White elites in the South who had briefly been removed from political power after the Civil War had clawed their way back by the mid-1870s, by playing up racial prejudices among working-class Whites to make the case that newly freed Blacks were getting everything they wanted, at the expense of White folks.

Waving the bloody flag was what it came to be known – the White elites whipped up votes among poor White voters by reminding them that it was the Southern Democrats who had their interests at heart all along, and used the bloody flag every two and four years to maintain their stranglehold on public offices.

The differences today: the philosophies of the political parties switched back in the 1960s, and the Southern Democrats are now MAGA Republicans, and it’s not just Blacks, but also Browns, gays and lesbians, the trans community, and non-trad-wife women, who are being sold to working-class Whites as the enemies to be subjugated at all costs.

One other difference: this strategy isn’t just being used down South.

And as was the case for nearly 100 years in the Jim Crow down South, it’s still proving to be effective in rural environs, where voters come out en masse to recycle old ideas that date back to the founding of our country.

That’s what frustrates me about where we are in this, the 250th year of our idea on how to do things.

I’m not one for holding people of the past to the standards of today, but I do think that we should expect to see progress from one generation to the next – and for the most part, that was the case, for the longest time.

It took way, way too long, but we eventually came to the realization that one group of humans shouldn’t be able to own another, that women should at least be able to vote, that both people of color and women should be treated as equals to Whites and males, that people of different sexual orientations should not be reduced to being second-class citizens.

And now, it feels like, for the past 10 years, we’re going back on all the progress that we’d been making for the previous 240.

That’s not Donald Trump’s fault; the guy is barely bright enough to know how to put his pants on in the morning, much less divide a nation of 330 million against itself.

The feeling that I had in 2015, that we were thisclose to getting it as a country, was a mirage, it turns out.

A sizable number among us don’t think people of color, women, LGBTQ+s, should be treated as first-class citizens – with the same rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as they have.

For those folks, America was better when Black folks and women knew their place, and as far as they knew, there weren’t even such people at LGBTQ+s.

All Donald Trump is to them is a loudmouth who says out loud what they’ve always quietly thought.

That he was able to ride racism, sexism and misogyny to the White House once, then twice, is an indication that, 250 years in, the words in that Declaration of Independence are just there to make us feel better about ourselves.

If you wanted to know why Augusta Free Press hasn’t been posting news items about the various and sundry America250 events on the schedule this year, well, now you know.