Until 2026, I really hadn’t thought much of America 1976.
But since Americans have let the ideals and ideas we celebrated then backslide, it can be claimed that ourselves of 50 years ago would be disappointed and angry at how those of us who survived or came along have failed the franchise.
In 1976, Americans could mark great progress regarding our national experiment. In 2026, there exists nothing presently we can point at or extol with any kind of pride.
National July Fourth observances commemorating the nation’s 250th declaration were universally insipid. Perhaps individual cities and towns actually honored America. And certainly, several foreign nations graciously acknowledged the event. Better than our own federal government did.
Maybe state and municipal governments, citizens organizations, remembered what it is to revere America. Federal authorities and agencies barely bothered to give the nation’s 250th birthday deserved honor.
Yet on the whole, what ought’ve been an occasion to puff out our chests in recognitions of what we’ve accomplished served to reflect the disappointment these United States have become. In 2026, there is nothing admirable about America.
Oh, sure, we enjoyed fireworks, resounding hymns, paeans to those who endured and endeavored before us. But let’s face it, at present the nation’s future is bleak. None of us should bother him- or herself with any optimism.
The clear thinking, the clear sighted among us, need only trouble ourselves with where will America bottom out and how soon. Until that inevitability we can’t even consider how we’ll save the franchise.
Part swapping does not work for national restoration. Our restoration will demand a total rebuild. Meaning that which we’d made sacred since in the years since Ronald Reagan perverted our aspiration toward greater freedom and wider prosperity for all into ever narrowing channels for the select must be ended then corrected.
The remedy may take a butcher. America may need a second revolution, one helmed by a Yankee Robespierre. Okay.
Which is precisely what the United States should demand after Donald Trump and his criminal administration as well as the American greed hounds who’ve put their insatiable needs ahead of America are grabbed by the scruffs of their fat necks and seats of their fatter asses on the way to being launched from the stage.
None of them can be mistaken as idols of America. They’re all our enemies.
True Americans can only pray the next administration will recognize this and treat them with deserved ruthlessness. No pleas for leniency, please. None of the malefactors who’ve disrupted America solely for their own enrichment or selfish views of how the rest of us may live will be deserving of mercy. Just any approximation to heads bouncing then rolling like cabbages that have fallen out of shopping carts at the offenders’ feet will suffice.
In 1976, this 21st century America could not have been imagined. Yes, there was a farcical novel by Sinclair Lewis titled It Can’t Happen Here. The author presented it as a fantasy, not a warning. A work of its time, the Depression, It Can’t Happen Here chided those complacent Americans who’d believed our nation had dodged the fascist impulses blackening Europe and East Asia. Believing themselves spared thusly, that should they take eyes off the ball, indeed, it could happen here.
During the interwar years, Americans having experienced what we had with the true birth of the 20th century through the Great War, what rational society could’ve imagined its successors, inhabitants of the globe’s most advanced society, willingly succumbing to a huckster who appealed to regression? To their least impulses? To lives their forebearers had striven to ascend and leave behind?
In Lewis’ novel the President of the United States served as the villain. Unimag8inable then. A regrettably daily occurrence now in our real life 21st century.
Who could’ve thought modern real Americans would twice prefer rancid cheese? Particularly after the first time around. “Fool me once,” indeed.
Which is what over half of American voters did in 2016 and 2024. They ignored the menace of the scab in 2016 and somehow repeated overlooking it in 2024. At least in the novel voters had no prior inkling of the candidate who would become a freedom-strangling reactionary. At least the novel’s Depression Era voters unknowingly imperiled America.
After 2016, voters blithe about the Queens mook knew they endangered the country by lying to themselves.
As we’ve all seen, that hasn’t worked out well at all. Moreover, it’ll get worse. We’ll all suffer further. The sole consolation is – and this a stretch – voters who willingly deceived themselves will bear the deeper regret. Though nowhere deep enough for the rest of us who saw the menace.
Small solace for us clearsighted. Nonetheless we’ll occupy higher rungs as well as take satisfaction in the self-inflicted damage of those below us. True Americans are now in an era of rescuing what rewards and satisfactions we can.
Too bad it’s science fiction and America can’t return to and rerun the Bicentennial. Those 49 years old and younger would be astonished at that America. Looking back, and this done subjectively, we were generally better people then.
Yes, those Americans gloried in our achievements, which were many. Nonetheless, they also acknowledged our nation’s imperfections. Rather than paper them over or become defensive then accuse the clearsighted of being an “America hater,” or lard the good at the expense of clear deficiencies as is performed today, a decent proportion were secure enough to admit stains existed. Moreover, and better, they resolved to work towards national improvement.
Now, the Bicentennial followed defeat in Vietnam as well as Richard Nixon putting loyalty ahead of the nation by trying to cover up misdeeds by his aides. The ironic thing about Watergate is had President Nixon laid his breast bare before the public, confessed his aides had been politically “overzealous,” the public would’ve forgiven what had been an at most a minor transgression.
Watergate the crime was penny ante. The coverup following it prompted a Constitutional crisis. As we have been taught since, coverups are invariably worse than the crimes themselves. But as also has been shown across the last five decades, the lesson has not taken hold in the American makeup.
Furthermore, had Nixon behaved as a statesman rather than a co-conspirator, he would’ve reaped the respect which forever eluded him. Aside from Watergate, Nixon was a good president. A man who had hustled and scuffed in order to rise, he hadn’t forgotten who he’d been, where he started, before achieving the pinnacle.
Were Americans to look at the domestic portion of his presidency, like LBJ’s, they might be surprised at programs and policies his administrations promoted to better Americans’ lives. These worked. Despite bean counter attempts to eviscerate them, they somehow mostly still do benefit Americans.
Best of all while the America of 1976 was quite imperfect, few of us then sought to deny the nation’s imperfections. Decades ago, there was no shortage of chest-thumping/eye-rolling bluster declaring “the United States the best country in the world!”
There was also no lack of courageous citizens, people propelled by common sense and clear sight, who refuted this. Rather than immediately resorting to Second Amendment remedies to a First Amendment right, more Americans than would be believed today discussed and debated the issue.
The subject being why did Americans claims ours “the best country in the world”?
Then as now, America had plenty going for her. Then as now, America was riven with discrepancies and disparities. Maybe we had better sight in the 70s.
Surely we possessed greater articulation.
We were certainly less angry Americans in 1976. Nor were we anywhere as commonly cruel as Americans of today. Did civil rights advancements and the nascent women’s movement finally start opening eyes? Were the habitually excluded finally starting to be seen as full-fledged human beings by 1976?
Back then we could admit our mistakes. Easier to do after the twin humiliations of Vietnam and Watergate. As wisdom confirms, the first steps towards redemption are admitting the errors. Our acknowledgments of such were less grudging then.
Moreover, the cruelties accepted in today’s daily life wouldn’t have been accepted by most of American society of 50 years ago. There were plenty of individuals and groups who hated that our expanding society lengthened its baby steps towards greater inclusiveness. Their rhetoric made this clear. However, rarely did speech lead into violence and that seldom, if ever, descended into the worst kind of cruelty – cruelty for cruelty’s sake.
Unlike 2026.
Today, the aforementioned practiced by government, of all entities, might’ve had extant haters during the Bicentennial pausing for introspection and contemplation. Not because they would’ve found their humanity, but from awareness if the script flipped, they could suffer the same measures.
The gradual normalization and acceptance of cruelty in our present would’ve been universally regarded as abominable in 1976.
Social pressure alone would’ve made all layers of our society disdain it. Now, though, reactionary law & order types who’ve hijacked conservatism have relativized unfeeling cruelty as “required displays of authority.”
A good guess 1776 colonials would’ve heard the same from their British masters.
Adherents of such are the ones likeliest to look past this as they bray ours is “the greatest country in the world.” True Americans can only wish they eventually realize such bloated proclamations signs of apprehension more than any expressions of pride.
Who, if anyone, needed to yell that in 1976?
Few, if any of us, bothered prognosticating about the next 50 years in 1976. Were you a teenager then, who’d want to think about being 60-something? And if you were in your 40s or 50s, wouldn’t you have expected to have been an increasingly hazy memory by 2026? If the future was regarded, it was grasped through evaluation, examination, and progress.
Yet on that July Fourth in Metropolitan New York (at least) could we see beyond the picture postcard day. We celebrated observance of the nation’s 200th birthday among family and friends, figures whose absence we then never could’ve conceived. Some older, some contemporaries. In either case, speaking of them in the past tense unimaginable.
While regal tall-masted ships entering New York harbor and sailing up to the George Washington Bridge the day’s biggest spectacle, the smaller, less prominent celebrations gently engaged Americans everywhere. Perhaps it was local luminaries reading the Declaration of Independence to citizens gathered on greens as prelude to modest fireworks. Or a lazy day at the beach only distinguishable from previous and future ones because of the date’s significance. Or a picnic/barbecue that brought together nearby and remote relatives, fetes which had been assembled with military precision.
The quotidian and extraordinary marked that gentle Fourth.
Seeing how tarnished our nation’s 250th commemoration was, that festival of 50 years ago ought’ve been revived in order to burnish our tinny present. We experienced genuine appreciation of America at 200. For our 250th birthday we got empty misguided bombast reflective of our nation at present.
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