Revolution remembered

April 15, 2025

When we celebrated the Bicentennial of our founding in 1976, I was fresh out of college, underemployed, and generally too busy to care. Now we’re sliding into the 250-year Semiquincentennial (yes, that’s a real word), beginning at Lexington and Concord with the anniversary of the shot heard ’round the world on April 19, 1775.

Besides ceremonies, Saturday will be another day of nationwide protest against Trump, Musk, and the hideous damage they’ve inflicted on our government and our rights. The MAGA mob will no doubt seize the occasion to sanctify the history of white American men while rabidly erasing everyone else. I’m one of those white guys. But like our country’s heritage, mine is more complicated than the right would have us believe.

To start, one of my ancestors answered the call at Lexington. Richard Stanford was among the Minute Men who pledged, “to hold ourselves together in readiness to march at the shortest notice,” each supplying his own musket. Records in the Massachusetts archives show Richard mobilized for just three days that April but later fought at Saratoga, a Continental victory and a turning point in the war. After it was over he fathered the last two of his dozen children and died in 1813. His granddaughter passed in 1840 giving birth to my great-grandmother.

Another relative joined Washington’s army at fourteen. A third perished aboard a British prison ship. However, as my mother used to say, “If you go back far enough in your family, you’re liable to find some horse thieves,” or in this case Tories. President John Adams, who knew a few of the Loyalists in my tree, said they, “exercised great influence…until they took the side of government (the Crown) in the Revolution and lost their position.” Three of that bunch got themselves booted out of the new country. Another wealthy family was said to be friendly with Maj. John Andre, Benedict Arnold’s accomplice who was captured and hanged.

Today, along with the farmers of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn,” the embattled include immigrants, investors, women, people of color, LGBTQ people, those who live in poverty, small business owners, veterans, children, seniors, doctors, patients, scientists, educators, students, park rangers, weather forecasters, librarians, journalists, attorneys, judges, every federal civil servant, and all who believe in government by Constitution, not some tinhorn king.

I’m not suggesting that anyone fire a shot. However, in the spirit of the Boston Tea Party, we can find out if Teslas make good artificial reefs. We can also remember that for all their failings and hypocrisies – in particular, their brutality toward Native and Black Americans – our founders left us with these marching orders.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.