Halfway to Five Hundred
On the Semiquincentennial
Most of the reflections I’ve read on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence look back to the past, either to the founding or to the bicentennial celebrations in 1976 (yes, I’m old enough to remember seeing the tall ships on Long Island Sound from Sunset Park in my boyhood town of Sea Cliff, NY). Yet “semiquincentennial” means the anniversary that’s halfway to the five-hundredth, so I’m thinking ahead to the year 2276.
If America still exists at that point, it might be as different from America today as America today is from America in 1776 - transformed by continual change, made up of somewhat different peoples through ethnic attrition and continual streams of immigration, with new population centers and perhaps even different states and borders, etc. Yet I suppose that even in 2276 we Americans will still be trying to figure out who we are and how to live up to the ideals set forth in the Declaration, since that’s an open-ended task which will never be completed. I also expect that America will continue to be rather different from other places in the world in our focus on personal freedom, our dedication to voluntarism and localism, our skepticism about the state, our mixing and integration of peoples from all over the globe, a culture that Albert Murray called fundamentally mulatto, and much else besides. But really, who knows?
