By Tom Robotham
I’ve never cared much for the Fourth of July. As a child, I associated it with the incessant noise of illegal fireworks and kids I knew who’d been maimed by them: a boy who was missing three fingers because an M-80 had blown up in his hand and a girl who was blinded in one eye after someone shot a bottle rocket into a backyard gathering. The holiday also reminds me of a parade I once marched in with my Little League team. When we reached the end, a stampede ensued, and as I struggled to keep my balance, I passed a Cub Scout lying on the ground and screaming in terror as other boys trampled him.
As a young adult, I grew even more contemptuous of the Fourth, with its mindless flag-waving, yuck-it-up suburban cookouts, and TV commercials suggesting that “blowout” sales for cars and furniture were somehow expressions of patriotism.
This year was the worst yet, in spite of the fact that it was a landmark birthday for our nation. To my mind, there was a hollowness to the celebrations, and many people I know seemed to be just going through the motions without emotion. Our entire country, it seems, is on the verge of exhaustion, and it’s hard to avoid the feeling that the great American experiment has finally run out of steam. I know that it’s hard for me, at any rate, to believe in a bright future.
And yet I wonder: Are things really as bleak as they seem?
As a professor of American Studies, I spend a lot of time trying to put current events into historical perspective. I’m especially interested in the Civil War era and it seems glaringly apparent that the crisis our country faced during that conflict was far more dire than any we face today.
Lately, though, I’ve been inclined to focus my reflections on America during my own lifetime: how our society has changed, for better or worse, over the last 70 years.
In many respects, Dickens’ famous line, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” applies to the era into which I was born. On the one hand, it was a period of economic growth and audacious undertakings. Indeed, on the very day that I entered the world—June 29, 1956—President Eisenhower signed the Federal Highway Act, which authorized funding for 41,000 miles of Interstates. Six years later, President Kennedy promised that by the end of the decade, we would land a man on the moon; and seven years after that, we did. Quite literally, we reached for the stars.
It’s telling, moreover, that I used the word “we” without much thought. Obviously, neither you nor I played any role in it. But there was a greater sense of “we” back then, as expressed so eloquently by JFK in his great inaugural address.
The sense of “we” was reinforced by the fact that so many people benefited from the robust economy—and from tax policies that favored the rising middle class. For me, it meant that my father could support our comfortable suburban lifestyle on a very modest salary.
Not all was well, of course. Systemic racism was fierce during that era, and anti-communist hysteria was still a force, despite the fact that Joseph McCarthy died in 1957. What’s more, we lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation. And just as that began to subside, the nation was traumatized by a series of assassinations, not to mention news of urban riots and a rising death toll in Vietnam.
Still, I can’t help thinking of the great progress we made as a nation, during my formative years, toward racial justice, gay and women’s rights, and environmental stewardship.
Shortly thereafter, however, the national mood took a downturn. Exhausted by the Vietnam War, Watergate, and a floundering economy, the country entered a period of malaise—a national “crisis of confidence,” as President Carter put it, in 1979.
Then came Reagan, with his “morning in America” message. Unfortunately, that ushered in an era of selfishness-as-virtue, summed up by the motto, “Greed is good,” not to mention a renewed vilification of poor people. The aforementioned era of “we” had become the era of “me.”
Reagan’s “war on drugs,” moreover, solidified a growing siege mentality in spite of his claim that America could once again become “a shining city on a hill,” and President Clinton made that worse with his 1994 crime bill.
President Obama, to his credit, tried to soften that mentality—and we should never forget the monumental significance of his election: the fact that a nation founded on slavery eventually elected a Black man to its highest office.
It’s worth pausing here to consider that more deeply. Just six months before I was born, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person. Clearly, racism remains a grave problem in America. Anyone who denies it has his or her head in the sand. But we’ve come a long way in the last 70 years toward realizing the idea that that all people are entitled to equal rights.
In spite of a recent resurgence of xenophobia, we’ve also made enormous strides toward living up to the promise emblazoned at the base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” When I was growing up, I didn’t know a single recent immigrant. Today, I live next door to a charming young couple from Nepal and regularly interact with students from all over the world.
They are all here because of an idea: that America is not only a land of economic opportunity but a safe haven that promises freedom from fear, as FDR put it.
Lately, we’ve made a mockery of that promise—as we have so many times throughout our history. Nothing could be a more strident violation of our founding ideals, not to mention the teachings of Jesus. And nothing could be more hypocritical. We hire immigrants to cook our food, mow our lawns and clean our toilets, then turn around and blame them for all of our nation’s ills.
And yet, I can’t help thinking of the famous line coined by abolitionist Theodore Parker and popularized a century later by Martin Luther King: The arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice. Again and again, throughout our history, we’ve proven that to be true.
It’s understandable, given countless recent examples of our capacity for willful cruelty, that many people feel otherwise.
We as a nation are still falling so far short of our potential—not just because of our hostilities but because we seem to have lost our capacity for grand aspirations.
What might this nation look like at 300?
Will it be a country of economic abundance, social justice, and compassion for all; a nation rallying around great public projects and the belief that we can always be better? Or will it be a shrunken country, living behind walls of fear and resentment?
I won’t be around for that birthday. But I still have hope that when push comes to shove today’s emerging generations will heed the voices of the better angels of their nature and bring the country ever closer to fulfillment of its glorious promise to the world.