Born on the Fifth of July: The next 250 years start now, so let’s get to work

A flag with a peace sign hangs from the author's porch in July 2026. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)

What now?

The excesses, stupidity and insensitive garishness of the chief executive’s American birthday celebration for himself is, like yesterday’s fireworks, just a memory. We’ll be paying for the party for years — one way or another — but the bangs! and the puffs of smoke marking the event have receded into the changeless past.

Good riddance.

What could have been a dignified and inspiring celebration of 250 years of American independence was instead shameless and desultory. The images that future historians will examine for proof of intelligent life may prove inscrutable: the UFC cage fight on the White House lawn, the “renovated” but algae-choked Reflecting Pool, the shoddy plywood mockup of the “Triumphal Arch” at the state fair event on the National Mall. Trump’s ballroom? It’s still a construction zone where the East Wing once stood.

In 1976, the nation celebrated its 200th birthday with ringing bells and tall ships.

“Americans, 215 million strong, lit up their night skies, filled their waters with ships and sail, marched up their streets with streaming colors, trembled the air with pride and song,” reported the Associated Press on July 5, 1976. President Gerald R. Ford signed the Bicentennial Day Declaration, reaffirming American’s commitment to “liberty, justice, and freedom.” At 1 p.m. central time, Ford rang a ceremonial bell on the  flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal in New York and reviewed a procession of tall ships from around the world.

Now we are a nation of 341 million. Ford, the president who pardoned Richard Nixon, has been dead 20 years. In those days, a president who stumbled a couple of times while disembarking from Air Force One was fodder enough to launch comedian Chevy Chase, whose pratfalls mimicked the president’s, to stardom. “Saturday Night Live,” now in its 51st year, has featured a cold open portraying the current president of the United States at least 70 times, but I seldom laugh. It’s difficult to wring humor from the terrifyingly absurd.

Here on Constitution Street, in our small town in east central Kansas, the days leading up to the Fourth of July weekend passed with little note save the peace flag that fluttered from our porch. The cats sprawled on the porch and slept through the heat. Our routine was unchanged. While I sipped a cup of black tea one night at my desk, I thought of Julys long past.

On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass — who escaped from slavery to become a leading abolitionist — delivered a speech in Rochester, New York, in which he asked, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” The holiday belonged to the white crowd, Douglass said, and while they might rejoice, he must mourn.

“At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”

The earthquake — the Civil War — came a decade later.

Across three days in July 1863, what would become the most pivotal battle in American history was fought on Pennsylvania farmland near the town of Gettysburg. The battle becomes ever more remote in our collective memory because more than years separate us. At that time, notes historian Allen C. Guelzo in his 2013 book on the battle, time was still reckoned by the rising and setting of the sun, and watches were set to the sound of church bells. It was not a modern war, Guelzo notes, because nearly all of the buildings in the path of the combatants remain. Modern firepower leaves little standing.

The battle is a touchstone to the present because it was fought to preserve a liberal democracy that would eventually end the enslavement of millions. It was the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, with more than 7,000 dead. Along with the fall of Vicksburg the day after, it spelled eventual defeat for the Confederate armies.

“It was not merely that Gettysburg finally delivered a victory, or that it administered a bloody reverse to Southern fortunes at the point and in the place where they might otherwise have scored their greatest triumph,” Guelzo writes, “or that it had come at such a stupendous cost in lives. It was that the monumental scale of the bloodletting was its own refutation to the old lie, that a democracy enervates the virtue of its people to the point where they are unwilling to do more than blinkingly look to their personal self-interest.”

Eighty-one years later, America was again engaged in great struggle to preserve American democracy, and freedom around the world. In July 1944, my father was a sailor on the battleship Pennsylvania while her 14-inch guns bombarded Guam in advance of its recapture by American forces. My father was a yeoman, manning a typewriter, and my mother was living in base housing in California. This was many years before I was born. My father rarely spoke of World War II, but he kept a framed photo of the Pennsylvania in the living room of our home in Baxter Springs.

While my father was typing, allied forces in Europe were bogged down in Normandy after the D-Day invasion. About 133,000 American troops had been part of the largest amphibious landing in history, and in the weeks that followed the fighting was hedgerow to hedgerow across the pastoral French landscape. In July, American forces encountered fierce resistance at the town of Saint Lô, a strategic crossroads. When the battle was over, the town was reduced to rubble and about as many Americans had died there as on the Union side at Gettysburg. But the battle paved the way for an allied victory over the Nazis in May 1945.

No wars are just. But some may be necessary.

As a kid I was taught that fireworks were a way to celebrate the guns and tanks and other tools of war that helped make us free, and I was an enthusiastic pyrotechnician. As I grew older, I lost my fascination for the actual bang! and became more thoughtful about the cost of war, in blood and treasure. As a nation, we have often committed great and unjustified violence — to Indigenous peoples, to the Japanese Americans placed in concentration camps, to civilians in the path of our military ambitions. But we have also fought for noble causes, as at Gettysburg and in Normandy, and sanctified those causes with American blood. The 14th Amendment would not have been possible without Gettysburg. The liberation of Dachau would not have been possible without Normandy.

I am an abolitionist when it comes to nuclear weapons, as I have written about before. But I am not a pacifist. One has a moral obligation to fight when the boot of tyranny is stamping on your face.

And they will tell you it’s for your own good.

What Douglass, the Black abolitionist, said in 1852 remains evergreen to millions of Americans who feel left out of this weekend’s Independence Day celebrations.

Answering what Independence Day meant to enslaved persons, Douglass said: “A day that reveals to him the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless.”

Douglass was writing from the viewpoint of an enslaved individual, but his denunciation of American hypocrisy transcends the decades. The eternal truth is that we are either a nation that upholds the principles of its founding, or we are a nation damned to the sixth ditch of the eighth circle of hell. The hypocrites in Dante’s “Inferno” wear capes that appear to be glittering gold, but are actually made of lead.

Now, on the 5th of July, in 2026, I ask — what next?

We must declare our independence from the gauds and shams of our present age and begin the work of liberty anew.

While honoring the sacrifices that have been made for freedom at Gettysburg and Normandy and Selma, we must realize the past is a territory to which no map leads. The only path is forward.

We must work toward a future that is more just and prosperous for all Americans. That means fighting for civic, social, political and economic equality. It’s not a communist or Marxist philosophy, but the bedrock of the Declaration of Independence. The political right uses these terms (inaccurately) as slurs for liberalism, explained historian Heather Cox Richardson in Atlantic magazine in 2023, as a way of denouncing as illegitimate any government in which racial minorities have a say.

The declaration, despite its faults for failing to include Black people or Native Americans or women, was the initial point of an American experiment that over decades would become ever more inclusive.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” reads the most famous line of the declaration, “that all men are created equal.” Our inalienable rights include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To secure these rights, we form governments, which derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

We must show the current administration that we do not consent.

We can express this displeasure with our votes, with our voices and by sharing our vision of what the future of America should be.

The tasks are many, but the most pressing is ending an unjust war against Iran that has cost Americans the lives of 13 service members and $135 billion, so far. Iran has suffered thousands of dead. The ceasefire agreed upon June 17 by the U.S. and Iran has failed to cease the firing, and the world economy remains unstable because of the lack of oil coming through the Strait of Hormuz. There is no noble cause or coherent strategy behind the war.

The war is a product of the current administration, which has little in common with the soldiers at Gettysburg or Omaha Beach and is increasingly resembling the booted tyrant Orwell warned us about. Of the thousand things that should give you pause about the state of our democracy, consider this: the new Air Force One is a $400 million gift from the Qatari royal family, one that President Donald  Trump will take with him when leaving office. This is not the symbol of a functioning democracy, but the symptom of institutional kleptocracy catering to oligarchs.

Still, there is reason to hope.

On June 30, the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. Decisions by the court have not been much of a reason for optimism lately, but this 6-3 holding was one.

It means that babies born of parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily will be U.S. citizens. Somewhere today there is a newborn who may grow up to become the individual to help heal our wounds and unite us as a country. About 260,000 babies this year would not have been granted citizenship if Trump’s order had been upheld, according to statistics from Pew Research Center. The birth of every American is a cause for celebration — another step toward fulfilling the promise of the Declaration of Independence.

Do you love your country?

Then help make it the kind of nation where the birth of every natural born citizen represents the civic miracle of democracy. At just 250 years, we’re still in our political childhood. Let’s work together so that in another decade or two we can be the kind of nation again that is the envy of the world. In another century or two, we might just become the kind of country where every individual truly has inalienable rights.

Let us celebrate the Fifth of July as that beginning.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.