Personal 📍

Six or seven years ago – before the pandemic – I was riding the bus to work one morning thinking how wonderful it will be when America celebrates our 250th birthday. A big anniversary, a time when America looks both backwards and forwards to the country it was and is becoming. Grand celebrations capturing our diversity as our strength, our freedoms and rights. Remembering the fights for civil rights and liberties, noting much we did right and how we overcome much of what we did wrong. Not about one man or concept of freedom but how our country represented a rainbow of views and communities pulled together in the common interest.

Then Trump 2.0 came around. I voted for the Trumpster but I had no idea what I was truly getting our nation into. After the Trump revolution of 2025, the vast changes in public policy rushed in with DOGE and repeal of longstanding regulations and policies such a promotion of diversity and DEI in favor of conservative government, America changed in ways that seemed less celebratory. But maybe I’m just a liberal Democrat who burns his trash, owns several guns, and voted for Trump. Yet, I also believe in diversity and that we should be celebrating all parts of America and it’s diverse coalition of people. Whether you live in country, raise hogs, drive a gigantic pickup truck and burn plastic garbage, or in city, are gay and ride the bus, you’re part of America and it’s history.

It seems like the Trumpster turned America’s 250th birthday into a personal celebration of himself and a radically conservative – white slice of American history. It’s not to say white generals or rural people aren’t important. Even those who smell like cow shit, sulfur water and burnt plastic. I do think in the pursuit of a more inclusive and accurate telling of all sides of the American story, there has been some loss of traditional history – the stories of great generals, the homesteaders, the first white people who cultivated the land. That said, immigrants and blacks – slaves and Freeman are also important parts of the American story. I get that there is only so many hours in the day, so much one can learn in the classroom, and when you a take a more diverse perspective on America’s history you do loose some things. Yet, some how I had hoped for more.

I was bothered a lot in High School and College how much of the lessons seemed rooted in diversity and ethnicity lessons, it almost seemed like we spent more time studying immigrants and slavery – and things like the Holocaust rather then contemporary politics and actual history relevant to our communities. Yet, both are important. Both are part of who we are as a society. Independence Day celebrations should celebrate the full rainbow of history that covers America both good and bad, both black and white.

But instead it became mostly a celebration of one man’s birthday, President Donald Trump. Of long dead war generals and presidents, of early white settlers, leaving out millions of Americans and their histories that were important and worth celebrating as our country turned 250 years old. I read about the grand celebrations back in 1976, with the tall ships and the floating history barges, and somehow America at it’s 250th birthday just seems kind of trivial and hardly worth celebrating or noting.

It is kind of disappointing in my mind. My parents got to celebrate America’s Bicentennial in 1976, a grand celebration compared to America’s 250th this year in 2026. Realistically, I know it’s unlikely I’ll be around another 50 years for the America’s Tricentennial in 2076 – I would be age 93 if I lived that long. For me, it was just another hot ol summer day camping at Moose River Plains, swatting bugs, but then again, I never was one for big public celebrations.