Reflections on America at 250

By the time you read this, I hope to be able to say at last that I have seen this great coun­try “from sea to shin­ing sea.” And to have done so dur­ing the week of America’s 250^th anniver­sary will make it espe­cial­ly meaningful. 

The tim­ing, how­ev­er, was coincidental. 

Randy Norris, who became my friend in Nicholasville when I was edi­tor of the news­pa­per and he was assis­tant coun­ty attor­ney, now lives in Seattle, and he invit­ed me to come and vis­it him and his wife, Kay, this sum­mer, and this was the week they could do it. 

If every­thing goes accord­ing to plan, we will cel­e­brate the Fourth of July by watch­ing the Mariners play the Toronto Blue Jays. Then two days lat­er, if fate smiles on us, we will help Team USA cel­e­brate their win over Belgium or Senegal in the World Cup quar­ter­fi­nals right there in the Emerald City. 

After that, we intend to trav­el by fer­ry to Victoria, British Columbia, for a cou­ple of days to see Butchart Gardens and Thunderbird Park with its totem poles. If we’re lucky, we may get to see orcas or gray whales. 

Except for a busi­ness trip to Las Vegas 20 years ago and a lay­over at the Dallas-Fort Worth air­port, I have nev­er been Out West before. So, being a his­to­ry nerd, it’s sig­nif­i­cant to me that I’ll be near where Lewis and Clark first saw the Pacific Ocean on their jour­ney of dis­cov­ery 220 years ago. 

For those who didn’t pay atten­tion in his­to­ry class, Meriwether Lewis was Thomas Jefferson’s nephew, and Kentuckian William Clark was the broth­er of George Rogers Clark, the Revolutionary War gen­er­al for whom Clark County was named. 

This will also be my first vis­it to Canada, that part of British North America that chose not to declare inde­pen­dence when we did — and will nev­er become our 51^st state. 

Our good neighbor 

The more I con­sid­er Canada’s path to nation­hood, the more I think it may have been the right one. Canada achieved its inde­pen­dence grad­u­al­ly, with­out a bloody civ­il war, and has main­tained close ties to the moth­er coun­try and her monarchy. 

As King Charles III play­ful­ly remind­ed President Donald J.Trump, he is Canada’s head of state. 

In a con­sti­tu­tion­al monar­chy, the peo­ple are guar­an­teed a non­po­lit­i­cal leader who is a uni­fy­ing force, and the prime min­is­ter, or head of gov­ern­ment, is mere­ly a politi­cian, not some­one to be ven­er­at­ed or vilified. 

Since the par­ties choose their lead­ers and the peo­ple choose the par­ties they want to run the coun­try, the prime min­is­ter is like­ly to be qual­i­fied. Mark Carney, Canada’s cur­rent pre­mier, is a Harvard- and Oxford-edu­cat­ed econ­o­mist who was head of the cen­tral banks of Canada and England, not a real estate mogul or a real­i­ty TV star like our Dear Leader, who humil­i­at­ed our good neigh­bor with his oner­ous tar­iffs and talk of annexation. 

It’s not about him 

As our nation’s 250^th birth­day approach­es, I have to admit, I’m not feel­ing it. 

The America I loved for 50 years is almost unrec­og­niz­able now. It took a dark turn 10 years ago when half of our vot­ers fell for a con man who calls him­self a “sta­ble genius,” yet wears truck­er caps with expen­sive suits while salut­ing a flag he nev­er served under. 

He is so nar­cis­sis­tic that he puts his name and scowl­ing vis­age on every­thing from per­form­ing arts cen­ters to pass­ports, although, thank­ful­ly, not on mine. 

He is unable to dis­tin­guish between patri­o­tism and self-idol­a­try. Last month, he post­ed to his own social media plat­form that the July 4^th cel­e­bra­tion at the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument would be “the most spec­tac­u­lar TRUMP RALLY of them all, a ‘TRIBUTE TO AMERICA.’” 

It’s as though he is say­ing, as France’s absolute monarch, King Louis XIV of France did in the 18^th cen­tu­ry, “I am the state.” 

America the good 

Trump promised to Make America Great Again, but America is great only when it is good, and there is noth­ing good about this pres­i­dent, his lack­eys, and their reign of error. 

This is a pres­i­dent who tried to steal an elec­tion by false­ly claim­ing his oppo­nents had stolen it and incit­ed a dead­ly insur­rec­tion at the Capitol. Then, when he became pres­i­dent again four years lat­er, on his first day in office, he par­doned the ter­ror­ists. Now he wants to pay them $1.776 bil­lion of our tax dollars. 

At the begin­ning of his term, he and Elon Musk, the world’s first tril­lion­aire, defund­ed USAID, which has con­tributed to the deaths of three-quar­ters of a mil­lion des­ti­tute peo­ple around the world, most of them chil­dren, accord­ing to recent estimates. 

And that was only the begin­ning. I could go on, but I won’t.  

And I won’t let him and his cult con­trol the nar­ra­tive about our great repub­lic and its his­toric mile­stone. The best way to han­dle a nar­cis­sist is to ignore him. 

I love America, even though it hasn’t always been the shin­ing “city on a hill” that John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan envi­sioned. It hasn’t always lived up to its found­ing ideals of lib­er­ty and jus­tice for all. But we must insist that it does, because that is who we are when we are guid­ed by what Abraham Lincoln called “the bet­ter angels of our nature.” 

In our 250 years, we have expe­ri­enced worse times than these, but we have over­come — and we will again.