Get ready America for a year of red, white and blue celebration! Our country is 250 years old!! Woo woo! Yeah, baby!! USA! USA! USA!
What? Everybody’s not brimming with excitement and planning elaborate celebrations state by state, city by city, community by community?! Surely there will be artistic contests for the best visual capturing America celebrating its 250th year of existence. Come on, we survived a civil war and all kinds of social protests that culminated in progressive laws and fairness for everyone, finally—all of it making our country truly great.
I was hoping our big 250th celebration this year will be reminiscent of our proud year-long celebration in 1976—when America wholeheartedly honored our 200th birthday. There were brief history segments every day and night on TV proudly told by famous actors and celebrities, called “Bicentennial Minutes.” At the same time, our nation’s more shameful and embarrassing historic tales were made fun of on a new late night comedy show called Saturday Night Live. There were lots of parades with people dressed in red, white and blue. The flag was on everything: jeans, denim jackets, bikinis, beach towels, blouses, halter tops, T-shirts, caps, bedding, purses, wallets, barns, billboards, trashcans, fire hydrants. Some communities were more into the Bicentennial celebration than others. And we had an impressive president whose main purpose was to oversee the country as we pulled away from war mentality to an era of calm and peace—man’s natural state. Jimmy Carter was our Bicentennial President.
From the wacky mind of a teen poet
I was proud to have been a part of America’s Bicentennial celebration in 1976. Our community held a Cultural Arts contest with the theme ‘It’s About Time for a Bicentennial.’ Categories included art, photography, poetry and creative writing. No digital or video categories in those days. Being inclined to write and also seeing myself as a natural rhyming poet, I quickly penned a poem and uncreatively titled my piece the same as the contest theme:
It’s About Time (for a Bicentennial!)
It’s about time
while we’re all at war.
It’s about time
to help the poor.
It’s about time,
and it’s very essential.
It’s about time for a bicentennial.
It’s about time
now that half the world is starving.
It’s about time
to get SOMETHING started!
It’s about time,
and it’s very essential.
It’s about time for a bicentennial.
It’s about time
for people to start thinking.
It’s about time
to make your brain stop blinking.
It’s about time,
and it’s very essential.
You know, it REALLY is about time for a bicentennial!
Nice to spot my burgeoning sarcastic humor and tendency to exaggerate, not to mention overuse of exclamation points. I don’t know how or why this poem by a 7th-grader kept winning the 1976 Cultural Arts Contest about the bicentennial. But my youthful impressions won first place by grade, school and then district. I thought my poem wasn’t all that great. Yet adults judged it worth admiring—as if there were some truths though awkwardly written by a kid.
At the time, America was very tired and angry and hurt after the Vietnam War and all the distrust of our government that came with it often about the long war. Wounds were healing, emotional wounds—the kind you pay a shrink to guide you through … to simply survive. As the 1970s continued, America did lose its way. I understood the reason. As a nation, we wanted to be left the hell alone.
Which brings us to America in 2026
Turned out our rejuvenated pride in America during the Bicentennial was soon forgotten, and the big chill of economic recession, energy crises, family splits, discos and cocaine and liberal mores left all of us feeling like we needed a strong leader. Our nation wanted a father figure, and we got him in Ronald Reagan who would turn America or Americans around and give us something of which to be proud. His campaign slogan was: Make America Great Again. He likened our country to a ‘shining city on a hill.’ He showed off to the world our American lifestyle, the one he knew as a Hollywood actor and governor of California: big houses, nice neighborhoods, swimming pools, kids riding bikes carefree, young people attending college for bright futures, families at dinner time eating together, and of course everyone standing with heads bowed in prayer at church on Sundays.
This was the perfect vision of America by Americans themselves. Again, this façade was comically contrasted every week on Saturday Night Live. The mass media and comedians never let those who listened forget that nothing was being done to help the poor, people fleeing narco states and terrorist nations, many Americans working two or more jobs to make ends meet, the deadly AIDS crisis, white flight, public schools that ironically were left segregated by the wealthy who could flee and the poor remaining. The 1980s would be described in an investigative series in The Dallas Times Herald as “The Mean Decade.” Trickle-down economics of which Reagan touted did not work for most Americans. It just made the rich richer and the poor poorer.
In the decades since, our country elected diverse leaders: an oil businessman/CIA director and VP, a pro-business Democrat, the son of a former president, our first Black president, a billionaire Democrat-turned-Independent-turned Republican, a liberal Democrat, and then again the billionaire who’s now leading our 250-year-old nation. The back and forth between conservative Republicans and progressive Democrats is maybe due more to economics than a voter’s personal governing taste.
But we always elect the leaders we deserve. And again, millions of Americans feel our country has lost its way. We cut international programs and funding that helped with good will (extremely necessary in the world today) and saved millions of lives. We took a chainsaw to our own federal government programs and cut tens of thousands of jobs which will lead to many more business and job loss. We slapped tariffs on a lot of goods with the extra cost paid by Americans. We’ve stopped vaccines in our country and elsewhere in the world. We’ve placed the military on our city streets and permitted deadly raids by immigration agents to clear out anyone suspected of living and working in this country illegally. We’ve created prisons overseas where the alleged illegal immigrants are being abused daily with no plans for court dates and judges. We’ve rattled our sabre, talked trash and goaded leaders around the world to the brink of war. We elected a convicted felon to the U.S. Presidency.
Could it be that America in 1976 was more civilized and better off than Americans feel our country is now 50 years later? Americans enjoy high tech but fear AI. We feel safer than we did in 1976, or do we? We enjoy working from home if possible. Fewer young people drive cars. More senior citizens cannot afford to retire. We have mass shootings in our schools that would have been unthinkable in 1976. And we can’t deny how fat our citizens have become compared to Americans in 1976. Just look at the reruns of ’70s shows. Perhaps our compulsive eating is related to mass insecurity about life in the U.S.—coupled with restaurants and junk food increasing portion size.
Yet in 1976 despite national anger about the direction of our country, there was an optimism which no doubt blossomed from the flower children of the 1960s. Hippies and like-minded straights constantly protested, for years, the Vietnam War and the draft; and joined with others for civil rights, workers’ rights, women’s rights and gay rights. And all those rights that eventually came into law made our nation the greatest on Earth. Let us reflect on our nation at 250 years—still young compared with most countries—and the direction we the people want our country to go. Let us remember our new nation was intended in the first place to be free of tyranny and ensure justice for every single person. And bring those ideals to all of us in the USA today.