200th Vs. 250th
By
Leonard Zwelling
This is for anyone under 50 years of age.
On the evening of July 4, 1976, I was on-call at the Washington VA Hospital where the National Cancer Institute had established a branch to care for veterans with cancer. The vast majority of the patients had lung cancer. The branch was led by Dr. John Minna who then and since has made major contributions to the understanding of lung cancer and its treatment. He is still an active investigator.
I can remember hearing the celebratory fireworks coming from the National Mall not all that far away from where I was trying to get some sleep as my intense clinical year on the Medicine Branch as an oncology fellow wound down.
During the lead up to the country’s 200th birthday, there was great anticipation in Washington. Gerald Ford was president and we were marching toward a national election, the first after the disaster that was Watergate. Because of Nixon’s resignation only two years before, and the end of the Vietnam War a year before, the country was definitely in the healing mode, ready to get all that bad news behind it, and surely ready to party.
Genie and I were also lucky enough to be in D.C. when the greatest orchestras in the world came through the Kennedy Center over the course of the year leading up to July 4. We had subscription seats to these concerts. We saw Berlin with von Karajan, Cleveland with Maazel, Israel with Zubin Mehta, and New York with Leonard Bernstein. It was a great time to be in D.C.
We still were renting an apartment in Bethesda, childless, and with no idea what we would be doing a year later given that we were both in the middle of our training. I was at the NIH as a fellow. Genie was at D.C. Children’s Hospital as a resident. Our future was in front of us, just like America’s.
Thus, in 1976, despite the recent hard times in the country, there was no way not to get swept up in the excitement and national pride that permeated the city and the country that year. America’s 200th birthday was a big deal and felt like it.
Today, with our 250th birthday less than two weeks away as I write this, I feel none of that excitement, joy, and certainly no sense of relief or confidence. Rather than have a war of choice in our rearview mirror, we have a war of choice adversely affecting our economy. Rather than have a criminal extracted from the White House via resignation, we have a convicted felon in the Oval Office elected twice. And perhaps most symbolically, the place where those great concerts took place is closing and the name on the front is under constant revision in a battle of wills between President Trump and the federal courts.
Our country has not continued on the hopeful path that greeted 1976. While Ronald Reagan’s election did breathe some life into the electorate in 1980, it was a response to the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter who was elected in 1976. Carter was driven from office by the Iran hostage crisis (are we still fighting these guys?) and gas lines. Since 1976 we have been in war after war in the Middle East with no benefit to us as a people or as individuals. We have seen several stock market crashes that could have been prevented. There was 9/11 which was essentially an intelligence failure in the wake of President Clinton’s unwillingness to deal with the threat posed by Al Qaeda five years before.
And then, as a fitting culmination to 50 years of American slippage, we have Donald Trump in the White House. A game show host and failed casino magnate has convinced America that he is better than any woman who would run against him even as the first of those women may have been the most competent person to ever run for president. I know she was only “likeable enough,” but do you think Hillary Clinton would have ripped up the Obama nuclear deal and then bombed Iran? Me, neither.
Unfortunately, at this moment in time, the United States has very little to celebrate EXCEPT we are still free, and, at least for now, governed by the Constitution.
I think we should dedicate the rest of our 250th year to reading the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to remind ourselves from whence we came. America is still an experiment in the works. It always will be. In my career in the lab, I have always found I learned the most when experiments didn’t go the way I planned and I had to be creative in determining how to design new ones to unearth the truth. This is true of our country as well.
The American experiment needs that now. The American experiment needs all of us now. We cannot allow a would-be dictator and war monger to spoil the party. Celebrate on July 4th. Before that, learn about why we celebrate and all about the great men and women who made this experiment possible. Then determine to do something yourself to make things better for the 300th even if, like me, you won’t be there. We can never get complacent about America. It was not a given in 1776 that we would ever get to 250, yet here we are.
If we can get to 2028 and stay whole, this segment of the experiment worked because no leader of this country has ever tested its values or its laws and Constitution to the degree that Donald Trump has. Not even Richard Nixon. If we can make it through Trump, we have a good chance of reaching our 300th.
