As we approach 2026, we are about to mark to 250th anniversary of the founding of our country. Centennial celebrations have a way of speaking to who we are as a nation.
I remember the bicentennial year — 1976. The war in Vietnam was finally over. Watergate was behind us. A president had resigned. We were ready to boogie in some of the worst fashion choices in American history. There were Tall Ships and parades. Arthur Fiedler led a hysterically joyous concert on the Charles River. We had an election that year where comically clumsy president lost a close contest to an evangelical peanut farmer and nobody stormed the Capital. Goodwill seemed to be on the rise.
One hundred years earlier America celebrated its first centennial in times almost as uncertain as our own. Reconstruction had brought about massive change in the South with African Americans elected to seats in the Senate and the House. But a wave of Klan murders threatened to restore the old race alignment. The country had just emerged from a deep economic depression, and the robber barons of the Gilded Age were pushing economic inequality to new heights.
And way out on the Montana plains a group of Lakota Sioux and their allies were making a final stand for their way of life. Railroads, ranchers and miners encroached on their territory as the government reneged on yet another treaty.
They refused to go quietly to their reservation, so the Army was sent to bring them in, led by a boy hero of the Civil War, George Armstrong Custer. Ignoring his orders to await the arrival of reinforcements, Custer plunged into battle and immortality on a barren hill where he led 200 soldiers to their deaths.
The nation was shocked by the news. How could the forces of a rising industrial power be annihilated by a band of Native Americans? That sense of national unease continued through the election cycle that fall where a electoral tie in the presidential election was thrown to the Republicans at the price of the withdrawal of federal troops from the South and the end of Reconstruction and the rights of recently freed slaves. Jim Crow laws would rule the South for the next eight decades.
It remains to be seen whether we will celebrate this anniversary with joy or with despair. My hope is that for one moment, we can stop hating each other, stop arresting each other, stop fighting each other and enjoy being us.
David Parrella lives in Buckland.

