Alan Zendell, July 4, 2024

My father was one of the last men to be drafted and one of the last to return from combat in France. He missed the famous celebration in Times Square and he never appeared in a newsreel kissing a pretty girl after disembarking from his ship in 1946. The flush of victory had passed, and America was dealing with a vast restructuring of its workforce, while wrestling with our new role as leader of the Free World. We had been an isolationist nation before the war, but now, we were about to take on the mantle of savior of our allies who suffered far more destruction during the war than we did.

My first memory of seeing my father was when he secured a weekend pass from Fort Dix to surprise me at my third birthday party. My next memory was standing with him and seeing him tear up on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn watching his battalion march in the Independence Day parade. I didn’t grasp the symbolism of seeing the troops and bands marching to Grand Army Plaza, which was modeled after the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, but I felt the enormous pride and exultation of the crowd, and I knew I was experiencing something special.

I didn’t understand that he and millions of his fellow veterans had come back to a serious economic recession. He pumped gas for two years to put food on our table. By the time I was five, every kid in America knew children in Europe were still starving. Our parents told us so every day and instilled in us the need to conserve and never waste a crumb. I didn’t understand the politics that resulted in the Marshall Plan, but I knew we were feeding the nations of Europe until they recovered from the devastation of the war.

That’s what Independence Day meant to me, then. We no longer have to feed our allies, but the basic idea of our leadership in a world that had almost been destroyed by the war has lived with me ever since. The year the Berlin Airlift began, the nation of Israel was created, and was immediately at war with neighbors who vastly outnumbered it and vowed to wipe it off the face of the earth. The following year, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb and the Cold War began.

My father and I watched the parade every year. By the time we entered the Korean conflict, I was a patriotic American who believed our nation was unique in history and the best hope for a world in which everyone could live in peace and prosperity. That sounds hopelessly naïve, but I was only eight, and that’s what everyone told me.

Seventy years later, I look at the world and see frightening echoes of the past. The brutality of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler’s lust to dominate Europe while murdering millions of innocent civilians resonate with Vladimir Putin’s obsession to recreate the Soviet Union. And the war between Israel and its neighbors still rages after seventy-six years, as dangerous today as ever.

More chilling is the political change we’re seeing around the world. In America, the decades since World War 2 witnessed a steady increase in human rights and the ability of millions to escape poverty and live the American dream. In 2008, we elected a black president! We thought we’d turned a corner in maturing as a nation, but many of us became complacent and forgot that liberty and democracy are not free. We ignored the cries of those who still felt oppressed and looked the other way when our veterans were largely abandoned by our government. We pretended that survivalist armies living off the grid and neo-Nazi and White Supremacy groups were just fringe elements that made good subjects for Hollywood screenplays.

We were wrong. It turned out that America had not become the kinder, gentler place we thought it had. All we’d accomplished was driving the forces of division and dissolution underground, festering and smoldering, awaiting the arrival of a demagogue to unite and enable them. History has proved that whenever a power vacuum exists, either a savior or a destroyer will show up to fill it. We forgot that the trappings of modern civilization didn’t replace but simply papered over the law of the jungle we evolved from. We let our guard down, and now fascist movements are growing all over the world.

You thought it couldn’t happen here? You thought Donald Trump was all bluster? Did you, like the rest of us, assume that our democracy and our Constitution were sacrosanct? Today is July 4, 2024, a critical time to reflect on what that means. It’s not just burgers, hot dogs, ribs, and watermelon as my friend Stan remarked, yesterday.

Everything we fought and died for in 1776 is at risk today. I hope Joe Biden can still do the job he was elected to do in a second term, but if he can’t, we must realize that defeating Trump is as serious an existential crisis as the Civil War was. Think hard about Independence Day, because this could be the last one that reflects life as we know it in America.