250 YEARS, A QUARTER OF A MILLENNIUM
This month, 250 years ago, the American Revolution began. On April 19, 1775, a series of battles — skirmishes really — took place around Boston between regular troops of the British Army and the militia of the Massachusetts Bay colony. The day’s fighting culminated in Concord, Massachusetts by the old North Bridge, where several British soldiers, whether under orders or by mistake opened fire on the assembled militia. This fire was returned. The British column was harried all the 21 miles back to Boston and by the end of the day 73 were dead and more than 170 were wounded.
The Battles of Lexington and Concord were the culmination of years of tension between the colonists and the Mother Country — the British detachment had been sent out to Concord to look for militia weaponry including several cannons — the Colonies had friends in Parliament and there had been hope the issues could be resolved politically but there was was no walking this back.
War had come.
In the life of a nation state, 250 years, a quarter of a millennium, is quite a long time. Very few countries stay the same. Borders and forms of government change. Broader geo-political events alter society.
Time is not an absolute. Objectively, time has measurably different values as the universe moves (Einstein) and subjectively as individuals experience it in their lives.
Historical time combines the objective and subjective. We measure history in years and years are objectively calculated as completed orbits of earth around the sun, but the events that take place in those years can seem to move quickly and then slowly and then quickly again. Time, as we live it is always moving forward but then some aspects of the world we inhabit seem to be going backward.
There are echoes of the past in the world of today. History rhyming. All Americans learn in school that the Revolution was precipitated by taxes levied by Parliament on the Colonies even though the Colonists’ did not have representatives in the House of Commons.
No taxation without representation.
But the reason for the taxes went back a decade to the French and Indian War (Seven Years War). When the bills came due for the conflict which ended in 1763, Parliament put a series of taxes on the colonies. The attitude was very much like Donald Trump’s to NATO’s European members: We paid for your defense, now you can reimburse us.
As you can tell, I think about Time in all its forms a lot. I thought that when I got to my age I would write about it. I looked forward to spending my pension years re-reading Heidegger, Einstein and the pre-Socratics and then summarizing and synthesizing their work with that of Georgi Plekhanov and Johann Gottfreid von Herder and Oswald Spengler and my own thoughts about historical time.
Like most journalists I started a novel, long ago abandoned but its epigram was from something the protagonist says in the book:
“Mankind’s progress through history is like the progress of a drunk trying to get home after closing time. We stagger from right to left to right again all the time thinking we are smoothly walking a straight line to our goal.”
But in the 40 years since I wrote that I realized that we don’t travel through history in a straight line. Yeats was right. We move through time in ever widening gyres. That circular motion, one of the ways in which individuals experience time, has brought me and America and the world America created over the last eighty years back to a place similar to where it was from around 1968 to 1970 — only progressed through all the events of the last half century. This shapes how we are experiencing this moment.
1968, another summons to the street. I really didn’t expect to be doing this. And I expect I am not alone among my readers who had other plans for this time of life.
A dear friend called me from out West last weekend. He had been to a demonstration outside a Tesla dealership. I don’t really think of him as an activist. He doesn’t think of himself that way either. He told me he didn’t expect much to change because he was part of a scene outside one of Elon’s showrooms but he did it because he felt like he had to do something.
I know the feeling.
I asked him what the average age of the protestors was — north of 60 was the answer.
On Saturday April 5th there are marches called for around America. Don’t even know who’s calling for them although there is a name for these demos: “Hands Off!” One is being called for here in London and so I’ll go down to Trafalgar Square and join the crowd and I expect the bulk of whoever turns up will fit my “been there, done that and now I have to do it again, goddammit,” demographic.
Years ago I swore off marching and only went on demonstrations to report on them.
The last one I went on as a participant was on May 3rd, 1981
In theory the march was about demanding the still new Reagan Administration not to get into wars in Central America, particularly El Salvador. But really it was about reminding Reagan and co. what one of the opening speakers at the Pentagon said: “Hello, We’re Still Here, We haven’t Gone Away”. The Anti-War movement, ten years older not sure how much wiser.
The Washington Post (where I had been working as a copy aide for about five months) ran a particularly snarky story about the event. Claiming attendance of only 25,000 — it was about three times that — but it did provide an accurate summary of who was there.
“Many of those interviewed yesterday -- from long-haired hippie holdouts with painted faces to L.L. Beanclad outdoorsmen to health-conscious joggers who had stopped by to witness the spectacle -- said they had come, not so much to protest U.S. intervention in El Salvador as to voice their disapproval of the state of the nation under Reagan and the state of the world in general.”
My deepest memory of the event was that it was the first time I was aware of how identity politics had taken over the organizing of the “left.” There were separate lesbian groups and gay men’s groups and Hispanic groups — not sure there were many African American groups — veterans’ groups, hard left cultish groups. The crowd was an assembly of mosaic tiles but with no plan for how to fit together to make a coherent picture. (scroll down here for a brief but more thorough description of the event.)
That feels very much like what April 5th will be about. But still …
One of the most quoted epigrams of the moment is Timothy Snyder’s Lesson 1 from his pamphlet On Tyranny
“Do not obey in advance”
The primary form of obeying in advance is fear. Those who are afraid stay home and stay silent. In the current Trump regime context, it is by staying quietly at home that people allow his plans to take root.
And even though April 5th’s goals are a bit incoherent being out in public with others is an opportunity to exchange info not just for online digital contact but for real world, analog contact.
On that April day 250 years ago in Lexington and Concord, the initial militia fighting force was just shy of 500, by the end of the day it was close to four thousand. The fighters didn’t come from barracks but through a well-organized system of personal communication from town to village to farm. That system took a while to build and that work in the 21st century context should begin this weekend. So we can summon one another when the time comes to fight for our country.
A final thought:
Fear eats the soul and there is nothing to fear from this crew of wannabe autocrats.
I don’t think I’ll be in the street for this, but I do bitch and moan and post angry statements. I feel like grandpa Simpson. “I’ll give the such a frowning!” but I don’t think I can handle a street protest, especially in the SC heat and humidity.