(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
250 Years Later - Concord, Lexington and our Would-Be King [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-18
On April 19, 1975 50,000 of us celebrated the 200th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord with an all-night rally on the Patriot side of the Concord River outside Boston. There was music by Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Phil Ochs, Holly Near, the Persuasions and others on a big stage with a huge banner reading ‘Send a Message to Wall Street.’ Our Peoples Bicentennial Commission message– this nation was born in a revolution. 50 years later we need a real one.
On that ‘April Morn’ in 1975 our presence across the “rude bridge that arched the flood” from where President Gerald Ford was addressing 2,500 people at the “official bicentennial celebration” was about our opposition to what Thomas Jefferson called, ‘The Aristocracy of our Monied Corporations.’ We countered with our own message of Economic Democracy, what today Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez call democratic socialism where the decisions that impact our daily lives are not made by and for rocket-owning oligarchs.
When a small dog crossed the shallow river and lines of mounted state police on horseback moved to block the hundred or so people who followed, 25,000 of us, on the patriot hillside, began chanting ‘The British are Coming, The British are Coming’ at which point the Secret Service hustled the president onto his helicopter.
It was a fun, colorful heartfelt way of reclaiming our nation’s heritage of dissent while practicing our first amendment right of free speech. Despite an unjust war that had just concluded and a president who’d been forced to resign after acting unconstitutionally, democratic norms held in the America of the 1970s.
We waved thousands of ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ Gadsden Flags that would, in the next century, be co-opted by Tea Party conservatives, the precursors of the MAGA cult of personality, that would in turn spawn thousands of violent traitors who, on January 6, 2021, under the guidance of a losing politician, tried to overturn a free and fair election (and were later pardoned by that same one-time loser).
We believed that in its flawed beginnings the Founding Fathers created a concept of popular sovereignty and principles of democracy exemplified in the Bill of Rights that have allowed us to continually expand our freedoms as a nation for 250 Years. The revolution addressed its most obvious contradiction 80 years later with a bloody second revolutionary war of unity and emancipation that ended chattel slavery and gave us the 13th amendment. It was fought by and for patriot leaders like Fredrick Douglas and his abolitionist friends. The American people went on to fight for and win the vote for women, followed by more blood-soaked battles for workers’ rights to organize, for civil rights, for gay rights and consumer protections and national parks and a vision of a nation under law embraced by generations of migrants and war refugees like my parents.
And of course, each wave of immigrants was attacked and scapegoated by Nativist politicians and movements including the ‘Know Nothings,’ the racist but also anti-immigrant Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi-apologist, ‘America Firsters.’ (Elon Musk knows their salute).
The Trump Administration’s directives to public agencies that Musk is gutting ordering them to censor all references to race or the use of the words ‘climate change’ while telling the Smithsonian, one of our most visited and revered national treasures, to purge ‘improper ideology,’ sounds closer in spirit to Mad King George III’s ‘Intolerable Acts’ than to George Washington’s army of Patriots (Trump told Congress he’s more successful than Washington and his loyalists applauded).
As President Trump “trolls” about being a King, and talks defiantly of an unconstitutional third term while threatening democratic allies and embracing tyrants we find ourselves in a situation Tom Paine would have recognized and did in ‘The Crisis’ writing, ““I call not upon a few, but upon all: not on this state or that state, but on every state: up and help us; lay your shoulders to the wheel; better have too much force than too little, when so great an object is at stake.”
With a MAGA Congress bending its knee and the judiciary and free press under attack I recall our democratic dissent at the 200th anniversary of ‘the shot heard round the world.’ Only now our democratic faith is being truly tested. My one hope on the 250th anniversary of that deadly frightful resistance on a town Commons and by a contested bridge outside Boston is that enough of us are still willing to commit our lives, fortunes and sacred honor to mobilizing, ‘We the People.’
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/18/2317292/-250-Years-Later-Concord-Lexington-and-our-Would-Be-King?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
