AMERICA AT 250: A COMPLICATED FOURTH OF JULY AND THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE
Reflections from a D2 Neighbor
Happy Birthday, America!
250 years is quite an achievement! But I still don’t feel like coming to your party.
This isn’t the first year I’ve had complicated feelings about celebrating the Fourth of July. It’s not even the first year I’ve wondered if we should be mourning instead of barbequing. Playing funeral dirges instead of setting off fireworks.
The founding of this nation, and its subsequent growth, is often idealized, but our history is far more complex and bloodier than a single three-minute country song can unpack. We, as a nation, have not always made the moral choice. We have left so many people out of the conversation. We have actively, deliberately harmed others. We have said freedom for some but not all. We are a wealthy nation and still can’t figure out how to care for our most vulnerable. Some things have gotten better over time, yes, but some things have gotten worse. And sometimes, especially under this current administration, it feels like we’ve thrown progress in reverse.
So yes, this year, sitting out the celebrations would be justified, and that might be what you choose to do. But one phrase from history keeps returning to me: “…of the people, by the people, for the people...”
Every Fourth of July in the town where I grew up, a parade wove down Main Street. High school bands marched, horses pranced, and trucks decorated with ribbons and flags drove slowly behind. After, we barbequed and ate watermelon and set off our colored smoke bombs while we waited for the sun to set. Always impatient, always setting off the good fireworks before it was dark enough to see them. Barefoot, we waved sparklers in the dusk, drawing in golden letters “USA,” drawing hearts.
The summer after high school, I spent the Fourth of July in a new town with new friends. We hiked up a small ridge in the Sierras and instead of watching fireworks, we watched shooting stars. We talked about our futures, our wild dreams, our fears and hopes, all the big and small things we wanted to accomplish, all the ways we were going to change the world.
Many years later, my husband and I joined hundreds of other Portlanders at Tom McCall Waterfront Park to listen to blues and jazz music until it got dark and the river lit up with a spray of fireworks. I remember being struck, not so much by the display, though it was grand, rather by the collective oohs and ahhs of the crowd around us and the way the cars on the freeway slowed to a crawl to watch too. It felt, for a moment, like it was okay to pause the constant rush of life and money-making and just exist together in this singular moment of light and noise.
There was another summer, a few years later, where I went to the waterfront again, only this time I was outside the park, swept up in a wave of people all pressing closer to the water hoping for a good angle to see the night sky light up. Here I was again, surrounded by strangers, and some friends. Connected in our shared goal to look up, to feel the snap and boom and crackle deep in our bones, to feel wonder and try to remember, to define and hold on to what it means to be free.
I felt a similar connection when I joined the Women’s March in 2017, and again for the No Kings in 2026. Surrounded by strangers, and some friends—all of us there to collectively feel the rage and grief and hope deep in our bones, to try and hold on to what we know to be true and right and just.
There is power in gathering, in finding common ground and linking arms, deciding to be in a moment and a place together, acknowledging the complicated past we’ve grown from, and how far we still have to go, celebrating a future we have not yet reached, but will keep fighting to see unfold. There is power in the people. We grow stronger when we remember that power: Of the people, by the people, for the people.
Make this Fourth of July a day of mourning if that’s what you need. There is grief in this movement, as there is joy. But I would encourage you to leave that space of sadness if only for a moment, step outside and find a neighbor, a friend, a stranger. Expand and deepen the community you have already started building.
Because Independence Day is not a celebration for the government. Not a day to praise our politicians or their failed policies. It is a day that serves as a reminder of who we are as a nation. Independence Day: when a group of people took a stand against tyranny and declared people had a right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and critically, that the new government would be driven by the governed. Not by dictators, not by kings, not by men mad with their own power and greed, but by the people.
People like you and me and whoever picks up the work after we’re gone. People who will press on with courage, redefining what freedom looks like in a future we shape together.