I was born at the end of the Bicentennial year. Old photographs from that summer show my sun-soaked older brothers and sisters riding their bikes down the street, covered in stars and stripes. Pure American childhood. Ice cream-covered chins. Missing front teeth. Tussled hair. Waving little flags in the grass on the little front lawn. A modest flag waving over the steps where my pregnant mom sits, tanned and glowing and smiling despite having her hands full with all these little kids running around.
The America of that year and that decade was full of challenges. I’ve heard. By the time the decade ended, I had just turned three. But back in ‘76, my father had only been back from Vietnam for 7 or 8 years. Nixon resigned in disgrace only a few years before. Stagflation was turning the screws on families like mine. High inflation plus slow growth and relatively high unemployment meant rising prices at the grocery store and job anxiety across the board.
The OPEC oil embargo had resulted in gas lines and price spikes, and by the Bicentennial, Americans could probably see that the era of cheap, endless energy was coming to an abrupt end.
The Church Committee investigations had pulled the curtains back on abuses by the CIA and FBI. Combine that with the fall of Saigon in ‘75 and Nixon’s humiliation, and trust in our government and institutions tanked.
Black Americans were still facing housing discrimination, police brutality, and the reality of being shut out of the larger economy, even after civil rights victories only a decade earlier. Material equality had not been a result of legal equality.
What was the point of our government? What was the point of any of it?
Fifty years later, the parallels are striking. Our economic turmoil is driven by needless humiliation abroad and a crisis in the Middle East. The racism that kept black Americans from buying homes and making real gains never went away. People like Pete Hegseth are dismissing and demoting soldiers because they aren’t white men. Oil and gas prices are wreaking havoc on the day-to-day lives of most of us.
Once again we wonder: what is the point of our government?
But there is a difference between the bicentennial and this Semiquincentennial.
In those yellowed pictures my mom still keeps in white and red and blue albums lining her bookshelves, the faces of her and my dad and their neighbors and the kids running through the yard and the candid folks in the background who didn’t even know they were being photographed — everyone’s face held an emotion that was so deep and earnest and obvious that it seems frivolous.
It was hope.
It’s possible — maybe even likely — that I’m tracing my own nostalgia along the outlines of their happy faces and seeing something that wasn’t there. But I don’t think so. The flags. The red-striped, star-spangled jammies. It was America, and it was wounded, but it would continue to exist, striving to be better.
I wonder about a child born this year, looking back over pictures of her own pregnant mother, fifty years from now. Will she see hope in the faces staring back at her through the decades? Maybe. But more likely she’ll see doubt. She’ll see tension and anxiety.
It’s devastating, this anniversary of our country, because it’s so difficult to find joy, to find hope, to imagine a way into the next 250 years that doesn’t involve some incredibly difficult times.