Semiquincentennial Ennui
I, Kally, the armchair historian, the person who has cried actual tears over the Boston Massacre which happened in 1770, the person who spends every Thanksgiving at the Miantonomo monument, who was able to trace ownership of a discarded clipboard back to the great granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton, am not interested the America 250 festivities.
Bear in mind, I’m from the first colony to declare independence, and from a town named after a signer of the Declaration, so there are a lot of semiquincentennial-themed events. Unfortunately, it’s also a very red town in a very blue state, which means that while we are steeped in history, the perspective is based more on blind patriotism than fact. History is very long, and our collective memory is very short, if it means we get to celebrate something without context.
I’m just not that interested in guilt-free backslapping where we congratulate ourselves for winning a war in which no one currently alive fought. If we’re going to talk about history, we should include a broader frame of reference. We should consider what motivated the actions that they took, who benefited, and whose lives were irreparably altered, or worse, ended.
I don’t think war automatically leads to glory. I know that there are circumstances that make war unavoidable, but I think it’s safe to say war is always bad. No matter the reason, no matter the outcome. If lives are lost, if land is spoiled, if people are displaced, even in a necessary and just war, it’s still bad. Now, we light off fireworks to imitate the rockets’ red glare, play a Souza march, and forget how many civilians died of starvation because the battles spoiled crops or made food and supplies scarce. Or that the Revolutionary War was concurrent with a smallpox epidemic, and troop movements likely spread it a lot farther than it would have gone on its own. While potentially up to 70,000 soldiers died in battle in the Revolutionary War, that number is paled by the 130,000 people who died of smallpox during the same period.
Only white men who owned land could vote, which means women, people of color, poor people were all just swept up in other people’s battles. Those are the perspectives that I want to hear, but almost all of the surviving first-person accounts are from men who owned other humans, and whose motives were rooted in high taxes.
It has been 250 years, and we have enough distance now that, culturally, we see the event in broader strokes. We talk about whole battles rather than individual soldiers, or perhaps, the whole war, rather than individual battles. I think that is a mistake.
This anniversary is an opportunity for real growth. History has so much to teach us, but why learn and sit with the discomfort of hard truths when there are hotdogs to grill?
