I’m much more alarmed about the state of our country than revved up over its semiquincentennial.
Donald Trump and his Project 2025ers are branding their festivities as “Freedom 250,” but the name rings hollow as they work around the clock to eviscerate our freedoms, along with voting rights, health care, equal opportunity and truth.
If the country I grew up in were a person, a vigil at an intensive care ward would be more appropriate than Trump’s rally, cage fighting matches and “Great American State Fair.”
I admit that my negativity puts me in the minority. In a poll conducted in April by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Research, 70% of the adult respondents said “proud” at least somewhat described how they felt about this 250th anniversary, and 62% said the same thing about “excited.”
But I’m not alone. Fifty-nine percent answered that way about “indifferent,” and 56% about “conflicted.” (Because the percentages add up to more than 100%, some in the sample obviously had mixed emotions.)
As July 4 draws closer, I keep thinking of two songs from “Nashville,” director Robert Altman’s portrayal of America through fictional characters navigating their way through the city nicknamed the Athens of the South but best known as the capital of country music.
Although the film was released in 1975, it takes place in ‘76 and opens with the patriotic anthem “200 Years.”
When I first saw it, I rolled my eyes as a singer with an ego the size of North America proclaimed that the U.S. must have done something right to last that long.
I thought of the atrocities our settlers inflicted on Native Americans and Black slaves, and how women were marginalized. But when I watched the movie again last week, I realized that the song isn’t as jingoistic as I’d thought.
There are mentions of “ups and downs” and “how far we’ve got to go,” as well as “how far along we’ve come ’til now.”
And in 1975, we could say we did a lot right.
Women and minorities had won rights that had been limited to white men, who are now trying every which way to re-exert their dominance.
Richard Nixon had been forced to resign, and his cronies had been held accountable for trying to rig an election he probably would have won anyway. I don’t have to tell anyone how tame Watergate looks compared with what the Trump/Project 2025 regime is doing.
Labor unions had empowered many workers who had previously been at management’s mercy, and income and wealth inequality wasn’t nearly as extreme as it was earlier in the 1900s and is now.
We hadn’t prevailed in Vietnam, but at least we had extricated ourselves from a conflict we shouldn’t have gotten into anyway. Most Americans assumed future leaders would learn from this mistake, but we’re embroiled in a similar one today.
Yes, our country has changed in some ways, but not in others.
Like real-life Americans then and now, the “Nashville” characters are preoccupied with their dreams, ambitions and problems.
The bicentennial is only mentioned in “200 Years.”
More significantly, it’s a presidential election year, but everyone’s looking at what they can get out of a third-party candidate’s campaign rally/concert while ignoring the rhetoric he’s blasting from the loudspeaker on his van.
Although I tried to listen last week, I, too, found myself tuning out after his first mini-speech.
But what I did hear seems more relevant than ever: “I’m often confronted with the statement, ‘I don’t want to get mixed up in politics.’ Or ‘I’m tired of politics,’ or ‘I’m not interested.’ Almost as often, someone says, ‘I can’t do anything about it anyway.’”
Maybe we can still do something in 2026. The question is whether enough people will.
“Nashville” ends with a shooting at the rally. Just about everyone there is either stunned or panicking, but an aspiring singer soon has the crowd joining her in song.
It would be an inspiring and hopeful finish, except that it only takes a couple of minutes to get the audience smiling, clapping and repeatedly affirming that “you may say that I ain’t free, but it don’t worry me.”
We had our problems 50 years ago, but there’s much more to worry about in this election year.
We can’t let the White House bamboozle and distract us as it tries to strip us of our rights and freedoms. If we don’t do all we can to keep its enablers out of Congress, 2026 could very well go down not just as a milestone but the end of the road for our democratic republic.
And if we aren’t free, any worries we have won’t matter one bit.
Canary note: Opinions expressed in any Op-Ed column appearing on this site are the views of the writer and are not necessarily the opinions of Coal Region Canary.
Want to be a columnist with Coal Region Canary? Contact us at newscanary@gmail.com.
Image: Marco Verch
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