America’s 250th Birthday Bust
America's 250th arrives not with hope but with division, resentment, and a longing for the unifying spirit of 1976.
The theme among my friend group is Geminis. So many years have seen epic Gemini parties here in D.C. Years ago, however, when I lived in matriarchal Portland, Ore., we Cancers ruled. Well beyond my own, this is a birthday time of year for me. Aside from friends and family, my birthday particularly reminds me of Stonewall, as I was born the weekend of those riots. Then there’s America, that moody Cancer whose semiquincentennial birthday we’re all about to mark.
I wish I could say celebrate, but please. The state we’re in….
As noted, I was born in 1969, making me 7 during the bicentennial. I don’t know much about July 4 of that year, as we were living abroad. My only fireworks celebration that summer was Swiss National Day at my grandfather’s house in Ticino. Our crappy fireworks got out of control and torched two of his kindling-dry palm trees. Sorry, Grandpa.
I do, however, recall the mood of that era. We were all deep in Americana. Was it my imagination, this era of red, white, and blue everything? Of butter-churn-chic interior design and “colonial revival” fashion? No. There is proof beyond my childhood memories. The country really was being celebrated. There was plenty of reason to celebrate.
Watergate was behind us. While Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the pre-Bezos Washington Post released their tale of that executive corruption, All the President’s Men, in 1974, the movie of the same name opened in April 1976 and American audiences filled the theaters. That week of July 4, the mood was light enough to put Wings’s yacht-rock-esque “Silly Love Songs” at No. 1 on the Top 40 chart. The Vietnam War was over. In autumn, Alex Haley’s sweeping story of American slavery, Roots: The Saga of an American Family, was published and held the top spot on The New York Times‘s bestseller list for weeks. Americans of the era were eager to examine the country’s past and imperfections, not just wave flags.
Come 2026, Roots was banned, temporarily, in some Tennessee school libraries. Presumably, it had been on those shelves for decades before arriving in our quarrelsome, oppressive era.
Today, we’re in the shit. Our federal government is a clusterfuck of epic proportions, as a withering, tasteless, vainglorious fraud lords over a coterie of slavering, enabling sycophants, themselves fueled by fear and arrogance.
As so many have noted before, the trappings of our 250th are not inspiring. From the Idiocracy-adjacent cage fight on the South Lawn, to the no-bid-befouled Reflecting Pool, to the Great American State Fair, which manages to seem even shallower than that pool. Rather, as our president pisses on the long-standing plan to mark the occasion, confident that he alone can provide better in the form of Freedom 250, there is an overwhelming feeling that the country is foundering. For succor, Americans can look to Pride celebrations for beauty and joy; not to the White House.
While there’s no chance I’ll be around for the 300th anniversary — not in this body, anyway — my own evidence-based belief system tells me there’s reason to think some descendant iteration of me may be. I have to hope America will have navigated its way to a better place by then.
As the Red Scare of the 1950s evolved into the Age of Aquarius, and the Gilded Age prompted President Roosevelt’s New Deal of all sorts of socialist wonders, we should expect the same. Perhaps even more so, as we’re experiencing the equivalent of both simultaneously.
What we have now is obviously driven in no small part by white grievance, as my racial majority comes to terms with soon becoming merely the largest group in a land where every racial bloc is a degree of minority. If some evolution of me exists in 2076, whatever race I may be then, I hope our country will have moved past this. This also assumes I’ll still be American. Being Canadian or Mexican might be nice, as I often wonder what universal healthcare tastes like.
Perhaps I’ll be lucky enough to enjoy a childhood field trip to what had once been the East Wing of the White House. In 2076, it will be the Harriet Tubman Memorial Center of American Culture and Education, open to all. There, I will learn about President Sarah McBride, elected as America’s first transgender president in 2052. So glad she was elected to two terms.
Whatever is in store, the future must be better than this present. This evil circle-jerk cabal of Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, Bill Pulte, Russ Vought, and the rest of the kingmakers can’t continue. They’re enabling this ruinous run that wastes millions on pointless flyovers that terrify my neighbors’ dogs and annoy me, that treats people savagely, that celebrates exclusion and denigrates diversity.
At least I can take comfort in knowing that while I’ll be long gone come 2076, it’s a safe bet that they, too, will be dust. Perhaps we’ll all be back as kids on that same field trip. And maybe this time they’ll learn a little empathy.
Will O’Bryan is a Metro Weekly senior contributing editor. He lives with his husband in D.C. Find him online at LifeInFlights.com.
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