MissConstrue@MissConstrue@mefi.social

Y’all, a brief moment of history. This is what the bicentennial looked like on the Mall in DC. 1976. I was wee, and had been sent to spend the summer with my father who worked for Jimmy Carter. This was the summer before Carter was elected, Gerald Ford was the president. (Y’all remember Ford? He may have been the last relatively harmless republican. For a given value of relative. )

The bicentennial was everywhere. The whole country had a party, even though there were protests daily, and many conservatives clutched pearls about hippies on the mall.

Trump stole all of it. The joy, the party, the mall itself. He is a thief of all things bright and good, and brings only hate, corruption and despair. And Stephen miller…that abandoned Victorian doll haunted by unrepentant nazis.

We should take the country back for joy’s sake.

(Edit, Vietnam was over by 6 months, I was 9, time was fluid and we protested a lot of stuff.)

AP photograph of the national mall in Washington DC during the bicentennial celebration. It is wall to wall people, dancing and having fun. The crowd stretches through the entire mall.
ALT
Richard Rathe@nickrauchen@c.im

Replying to an earlier post

@MissConstrue

I could not agree more!

I found more photos from that event: historycollection.com/26-photo

It was good to scroll thru them.

I was about five years older than the kid at the top of this photo. You can tell that they were glad to be part of a whole. And it was a hopeful time... we were getting our act together. We were righting wrongs. For context, these are the things that were on my mind at that time...

The first #Oil #Crisis 🛢️
#Watergate 🕵️
#Racism and the #CivilRights Movement ✊🏾
The #VietnamWar (I was subject to the draft.) 🪖
The #ColdWar with its attendant #Nuclear Dread 🤯

My friends and I were particularly concerned about protecting the #Environment 🌲 , tried to avoid cars, and rode our #bicycles everywhere. 🚴

So what about the #Semiquincentennial? Let's say it's a celebration deferred. We need to get our act together, we need to right some wrongs, we need to start feeling AND acting like a whole again.

We've made a start, we can do it, and when we're on the right track again I'll be there with you all to celebrate! 💕 🇺🇸

Building a human pyramid to fly the American Bicentennial flag (July 4, 1976)
ALT
Jul 4, 2026, 21:21 UTCen