JULY 4, 2026 – To be honest, for me, the Bicentennial was a much bigger deal than the Semiquincentennial.[1] This inverted perspective is counter-intuitive: after all, “a quarter of a millennium” (or “half of half a millennium”) is much grander-sounding than “two centuries.” If celebration at the 200-year mark years warranted a few extra “bombs bursting in air,” surely the bonus round of 250 years is worth the extra “flash and bang.”
But for this gray-bearded time-traveler, the red-white-and-blue of airborne strontium carbonate (red), magnesium powder (white), and copper chloride (blue) was far brighter (and the rapidly expanding gas produced by ignition of tightly packed black powder, far louder) in 1976 than it is in 2026. Back in the day, even throughout 1975, which was the 200th anniversary of “The shot heard round the world”—a reference to the Battles of Lexington and Concord (ironically), the opening round of the Revolutionary War—you saw and heard an explosion of references to the Bicentennial. In the following year, everywhere you turned, reminders of the first Fourth of July were wrapped in colorful patriotism and framed in a communal sense of enduring achievement.
Today? Hmmm. The arguably bigger deal of a semiquincentennial is overwhelmed by a cascade of crass, much of it intentionally devised to divide and conquer the very citizenry that ought to be unified by historically principle-based patriotism. What’s to account for my 50-year slide into cynicism? Au fond, naivete—not only my own, but that of the nation generally; or more precisely, the juxtaposition of naivete to knowledge.
The Bicentennial happened to coincide with my graduation from college—as an American history major, no less, with an emphasis on our national foundations. In retrospect, if my grasp of the details surrounding the formation of our national government was deeper than the command of such by your average pre-med student, my knowledge wasn’t much wider conceptually than the understanding among members of the high school marching band in the Fourth of July parade of Anytown, U.S.A. In a nutshell, that concept—in the best of times—was, “‘We the People’ were endowed with ‘certain unalienable Rights, and among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’” . . . et cetera. (Crack, sizzle . . . BANG!)
Naivete, colored by typical nationalistic “patriotism” was standard fare for my generation. To be sure, as we worshipped Jefferson and Washington in the Pantheon of the Founding Fathers, we were aware of the existence of slavery in the southern colonies and the grand compromise that resulted in the “three-fifths rule” for state census (and Congressional representation) purposes. We readily acknowledged the evil of slavery, but this elemental exception (not to mention the other big exception: women’s suffrage) to American Exceptionalism didn’t inhibit deification of gentlemen such as Jefferson and Washington. And in my individual case, despite a deep-dive undergraduate course into the causes of the Civil War and a study of the conflict itself—or perhaps because of that very course—I realize in retrospect that as bad and wrong and cruel as slavery was, it obtained convenient psychological expungement from our moral record by Lincoln’s concise Emancipation Proclamation upheld by the military outcome of the conflict. As the astute observer would surmise, my formal studies didn’t include a probative inquiry into Reconstruction, the Compromise of 1877 or the slide into Jim Crow—de jure in the South and de facto elsewhere.
Only after our oldest son’s activism triggered by a local (as in less than a half-mile from our leafy, liberal neighborhood) police shooting of a Black man during a routine traffic stop a decade ago did I “go back to school” and read what had eluded me in my formal education. In reading Taylor Branch’s definitive three-volume biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Caro’s landmark, four-volume biography of LBJ I began to see how slavery was—and continues to be—a defining blemish upon our story as a nation. Once the blindfold was removed, I discovered, I could no longer hide behind ignorance.
With disturbing curiosity, I turned to other books that would affect my perspective: Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower; Crazy Horse and Custer by Stephen Ambrose; The Rediscovery of America by Ned Blackhawk; Slavery by Another Name by Douglas Blackmon (I kid you not); The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson; Facing the Mountain, by Daniel Brown; and A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn—to list the most memorable. Add to these various documentaries about the Revolutionary War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the McCarthy Era and I learned to see America as a deeply flawed enterprise—right down there with so many other powerful nations and empires in history.
This isn’t to say that cynicism killed my commitment to The Experiment. At the same time as my reckoning with the realities of our past, I happened to be representing many immigrants in my law practice—business owners, mostly, but also mosques in construction financing, compelling a crash-course in Sharia finance. In these immigrants I learned to see the true genius of America, in our development as a country of immigrants. These people, I observed, grasped the operating principles of America better than most Americans whose immigrant origins were long forgotten. The newcomers understood too that in large regard the full and consistent application of these principles was aspirational. Nonetheless, these hard-working, striving, optimistic contributors to the American Experiment were committed to “being American.” In them I saw hope for the future; in their pride as new Americans, I was experiencing renewed faith as an old American.
Then came the red tide of red herrings; scapegoats contrived by people poised to exploit our weakness for snake oil purveyed by carnival barkers online and over the airwaves and eventually, on the political soapbox. The onslaught gained momentum from the greatest huckster of them all, who transformed a tide into a tsunami. The inundation began its crest on January 6, 2021, then overwhelmingly in the man’s second inaugural speech four years later. Soon the ill-tempered waters from the underbelly of society flooded our country end-to-end—along with its foreseeable prospects.
When the current regime unleashed its brutal ICE raids in a burst of retribution against Minnesota early this year, any principled American could readily see the depths to which we’d once again sunk. It was hardly the only or the most consequential attack on what is good about our foundational ideals. Though it sparked an encouraging backlash among the majority of Twin Citians, the crisis and damage initiated and fueled by the regime was insufficient to cause effective rebellion against the tyrant; against the King George III of our times.
Since last winter’s scourge, the arrests, the detentions, the deportations have continued, only in quieter, more insidious fashion. Recent reports, in fact, indicate that the “daily quotas” nationwide have increased. Moreover, the regime fueled by hubris, cruelty, vengeance, avarice, ignorance, incompetence, dishonesty, and sycophancy has become more emboldened; more determined to crush its enemies—actual and perceived.
As we watch our Leader obsessed with himself leads an entire political party into the great undoing of all that was good about America—despite our deep and abiding flaws; a testament to the deep and abiding strength of all that was good—we must view this evening’s fireworks with grave concern. Do they signal a final warning ahead of November’s scheduled mid-term elections? Will they alert us to what’s now at stake—not as some theoretical prospect but as the embodiment of what’s best of America tied to a pole surrounded by piles of dry wood, with the masters of evil standing by with lighted torches?
As we “Oooo!” and “Ahhhh!” in response to the red, white and blue pyrotechnics, will we sit in the folding lawn chairs of exhaustion, denialism and complacency or will we stand on the bedrock of principles and take back our country?
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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
[1] A quintessentially Latin term: “semi” = “half”; “quin” = “five”; “centennial” = 100 years. Thus: “half of 500 years” = “250.”
