GUEST APPEARANCE: On our 50th, 200th, 250th, and 300th reunions |
In the US bicentennial year, I graduated from college; the excitement of possibility was personal and national, I was lucky to be in a nation that was graced with good fortune and the belief that good fortune was within the reach of most folks. After all, the Civil Rights movement, the Great Society programs, Affirmative Action, and robust support of the arts and science seemed to be fulfilling broad national hopes. Roe v. Wade had been decided earlier, cities and rivers were no longer burning. There was a consensus that genocidal and colonial wars were in fact violations of our national ethos.
Fifty years later, it is the year of our nation’s semiquincentennial celebration and my 50th college reunion. The reunion was lovely — though after 50 years there are gaps where friends might have stood with us, and certainly a sense that some were far luckier in their course of life than others. But of the 250th — it is difficult to imagine fireworks on the National Mall or a whirlwind tour beginning at St. John’s Episcopal Church at Lafayette Square, then Valley Forge, Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, and then on to New York City and a parade of “tall ships,” as then-President Gerald Ford did, offering relief from the duplicity and corruption of Nixon. There were tall ships in NYC and fireworks over D.C., but the Reflecting Pool was cordoned off, the East Wing of the White House is demolished, and a deadly heat wave settled in as a reminder of the climate crisis that Trump denies.
Perhaps the Bicentennial was the last of innocent celebrations: Ford had to preside over the need to recover from Nixon’s abuse of power, considering himself a bystander like the rest of us to the........