In little more than a week, on Saturday, April 19, 2025, is the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord. The night before, Paul Revere and friends took their famous midnight rides through the Massachusetts countryside after being warned by lanterns from Boston’s Old North Church that “the British are coming!”

Lexington and Concord are widely regarded as the beginning of the American Revolution. While tensions between England and the colonies had been growing for years, Concord was the first time both sides drew blood. Go to North Bridge and see the markers where British troops and colonials fell.

An argument can be made that act -- each side drawing blood -- galvanized an awareness that here now were two separate nations. In the play “1776,” Pennsylvania’s John Dickinson and Massachusetts’ John Adams get into one of their debates about “independency,” specifically, events in New England. Dickinson asks, “are these the acts of Englishmen?” Adams responds they are the deeds of “Americans.” When Dickinson asks what is so terrible about being an Englishman, Franklin answers by saying it is like comparing an ox to a bull: “he appreciates the compliment but would rather have what is rightfully his.” And that launches into a debate about the “rights” of Englishmen in America, Franklin concluding: “We’ve spawned a new race here… We’re a new nationality. We require a new nation.”

That conception arguably happened on North Bridge, Concord.

With roughly a week until the Semiquincentennial of those important events, the question is: why are so few people talking about the anniversary? Why the silence? Why the neglect?

Back in 1975, as Americans approached the Bicentennial, it was commonplace to note what happened 200 years earlier.

Have we so succumbed to the tyranny of the moment that a preoccupation with the current politics of the 24-hour news cycle blinds us to everything else? Has politics become so all-consuming that it cloaks anything not political, not of the moment?

Or has the Left’s “deconstruction” of U.S. history alienated our people from their past and its traditions? Has the “demythologizing” of that history left us to believe that the settlement of the Americas and the founding of the United States was one huge miscarriage of justice, steeped in “systemic racism” and irredeemably corrupted? Have ideological pushes like the “1619 Project” consigned not just pride in, but U.S. history itself, to some memory hole, best unacknowledged unless apologized for?

Has a land whose people went within two centuries from “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” to a ride to the moon… and hopes to go on to Mars… lost its dreams? Its pride? Its patriotic feel?

As we approach America’s 250th anniversary next year, will we enter the celebration with pride in what our country has achieved? Or will the “standard” approach be the Left’s usual grievance mongering bellyache that manages to make every celebration a Pepto-Bismol moment? Or will we just feign historical amnesia?

The Trump Administration has committed itself to a robust celebration of the American Semiquincentennial. Will Americans have the sense to realize that, whatever else divides them, a joyful celebration of their nation’s founding and its survival for a quarter of a millennium is something necessarily worth celebrating together, differences or partisanship notwithstanding?

Image: Public Domain