July fourth, 1975!
July fourths tent to blend in for me! The day is usually warm. The fireworks are usually bright and beautiful whether we see them in person at some ballpark or simply on television as we watch with countless others as the Boston Pops performs in the city where freedom was so hard won over two hundred and thirty years ago now. My father used to like to set them off in our back yard in my youth and I can remember him lighting the fuses and running to hide to protect his personage and his one remaining good eye. It took me years to realize that it took a little bit of courage to be around fireworks when you only have one eye left.
Around the thirtieth of June in the year of our Lord 1975, some friends and I drove to the capital city of neighboring Indiana to attend a young Republican convention. They were held every so many years around the nation but this one was close enough for us to be able to easily attend. Indianapolis was a good site for a convention that was to be held that included the fourth of July because it was filled with memorials to those who had fought and struggled and died for the right for us to assemble more or less peaceably to express our rights as citizens in the year before the nation would celebrate its two hundredth year of independence.
Indiana sent its fair share of citizen soldiers to the American civil war and the many truly impressive memorials to their service in that war and so many others dotted the scene in the center of the city. You wouldn’t think that a town would care that much about it’s past but Indianapolis and the state of Indiana apparently did. We ended up returning to Indianapolis many times over the years as it was the home to our work company’s regional office but we did not know that on this particular July day when we would celebrate our past.
As dusk came over the city of Indianapolis, this same group of friends and I gathered at our hotel in a round restaurant and bar that rotated away giving us a continual view of the city as we moved so slowly around. We drank our drinks and got slowly imbibed as we watched the show of fire works displays going on around the city and its outskirts that seemed to us anyway to be being put on especially for us. We were living in the anticipation of what would go on just a year later when the great celebrations would occur but we did not seem to realize or appreciate at the time that any fourth of July is so very special because of what it symbolizes for a nation that seems to be increasingly mired in the problems and disagreements of today that are so rooted still in a past both so near and yet so far away at the same time.
We once read an article that stated that the United States always seems to be on the verge of some sort of great crisis but also, so far anyway, seems to be able to get past them as it perpetually looks toward a future filled with both wonderment and awe and some trepidation all at the same time. 1975 was the year after Watergate and Republicans that year realized that there was a good chance that they might not retain the presidency in the election year that would be 1976. But, the party still had liberal and conservative wings to it at that time and there did seem to be a balance as things went forward. We didn’t realize it at the time but the Young Republicans that we represented in Indianapolis were the early torchbearers of the radicalism that would later engulf the Grand Old party and shake it to its roots. We listened to speakers who spoke of things that Republicans today take for granted as their standard fare. Problems with Social Security and large government and too much regulation dotted the landscape of those who would one day lead the Republicans down the paths that they currently take. And, perhaps most ominously, the talk of too high taxes also reared its ugly head across the scene. We didn’t think about it so much then but, particularly on the fourth of July, we should have realized that those who gave their lives to make this nation free might not have griped about taxes very much at all so long as they had that precious representation that they paid such a high price to secure. As we gazed out toward the row of monuments featuring those who gave so much, they only stared silently back at us, keeping their opinions to themselves. Later on, we went to one of the nightly buffets that the local media liked to cover where we feasted on caviar and other delicacies that the corporate sponsors had provided for us. Some things with Republicans never change!
We have long since left the Republican party and we no longer associate with those who we had so much fun with on that July, 1975 week. But we wonder sometimes what might have transpired if Gerald Ford, a moderate Republican, had been able to win the close election of 1976, and, whether that might have kept the truly radical Ronald Wilson Reagan out of the White House and where our nation might be today if that had occurred. But, one cannot buy back the past and the future is upon us as it usually always is.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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