07/04/2026
This seminal 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States should be a celebration of Freedom, sacrifice, honor, duty, science, art and other distinguished characteristics that have branded this country's multi-colored history as unique and irreplaceable.
The best local march toward America's founding anniversary this summer was in Upper Alton with the 159th Memorial Day parade.
Thank you to the organizers and participants for the elegant prelude to today!
Elegant bbq's garnished with sweets, games and/or sporting event spectacles, while featureless everyday utilities are wrapped in plastic representations of 'old glory' shame a cherished legacy.
Perhaps we live on the edge of a great divide in history and so are divided ourselves between the desire for a gracious, intimate, detailed and highly particular landscape and an urge less articulate to voyage out on explorations not yet made.(1)
The Kathryn M. Bruder Center at Washington University also hosted an unforgettable tribute to America's earliest history, the 36th Annual Indigenous First Nations Powwow! This event centered on the theme: "7 Generations: Honor Ancestors, Traditions, and Resilience. This theme reflects the sacred responsibility to carry forward the wisdom, values, and teachings of those yet to come. It emphasizes the interconnections of past, present and future generations, reminding us that every step we take today is guided by ancestral knowledge and impacts the next seven generations."
Thank you for the privilege of witnessing their majesty!
The events celebrating this 250th anniversary will be all the poorer without having attended this spectacular annual event.
There is no more appropriate appreciation for the meaning and value of what this anniversary means than that provided by the William and Florence Schmidt Art Center at South Western Illinois College (SWIC) campus .
A sincere gratitude to Mrs. Dawn Blum's curation of a one of a kind collection of veteran made art. The breadth of expression and creativity is an overwhelming, unique, patriotic and moving experience.
This collection includes personal anecdotes of service abroad and state-side sacrifices and the rediscovery of a proposed plan for the Vietnam Memorial Wall.
In a similar vein, the monumental unveiling of the Military Ascent memorial in Grafton also paid a respectable tribute to those who sacrificed everything.
The involvement of Leech Lake Ojibwe Honor Guard members of the First Nations from Minnesota was vital and a significant enhancement to the ceremony. Thank you especially to Bernice Mitchell for her gratitude and patience in revealing her experiences along the way in contributing to this opening event.
"Our twentieth century has turned out to be more cruel than those preceding it, and all that is terrible in it did not come to an end with the first half.
The same old caveman feelings... are tearing our world apart. Mankind's salvation lies exclusively in everyone's making everything his business... so that one people accurately and concisely knows the true history of another with a power of recognition and acute awareness as if it had lived through that history itself-- and could thus be spared repeating old mistakes.
The simple act of an ordinary courageous man is not to take part, not to support lies! ...Writers and artists can do more; they can VANQUISH LIES! In the struggle against lies, art has always won, and always will... Lies can stand up against much in the world, but not against art. (2)
Resources:
} 36th Annual Powwow
https://sites.wustl.edu/budercenter/36th-annual-powwow/
} William and Florence Schmidt Art Center
https://www.swic.edu/theschmidt/exhibitions/current-exhibitions/
} Yale : a look inside America at 250 history
America at 250 A history DeVane lecture, class 1 - the Rd. to 250
https://youtu.be/7TNcFQiqHGw
} Ascent Memorial
https://www.graftonmemorial.org
1} Mailer, Norman, Streets in the Clouds, 1965.
2} Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, "Once Pledged to the Word", acceptance speech for Nobel Prize in literature, 1970
