How my experiences 50 years ago reflect the hell road the US has been on my whole life

It was Sunday, July 4th, fifty years ago (1976 was a leap year, so), when I saw the nearly two years of work toward the US’ bicentennial come to fruition. I was six years old, a couple of weeks removed from first grade, my first girlfriend in Diana, and the end of the series The Brady Bunch, that idyllic example of suburban California life and a large white nuclear family. Two years’ worth of fundraising, red-white-and-blue commercials, and just general and genuine buzz and excitement about the US reaching birthday 200 made me happy to be alive to witness it.

I remember quite a few things from that day, the calm before the storm. I begged my mom and dad for an ice cream sandwich at the corner store on South 6th Avenue and West 3rd Street in Mount Vernon, New York, driving my older brother Darren up a wall with all my talking. I wanted it because the wrapper it came in was aluminum metallic with a red stripe, just like the color of the Metro-North trains that ran between New Haven, Connecticut and Grand Central Station in the city.

I stood on the platform at the main Mount Vernon stop waiting for the Metro-North train into Grand Central, having finished my ice cream. I was watching a murder of crows pick over picked-over food dumped near a couple of garbage cans and remembered something my teacher Ms. Griffin talked about that year. It was about some Greek or Egyptian tradition of putting coins over the open eyes of the recently deceased, lest some crows or vultures come by to pluck them out.

We were somewhere near or in Battery Park watching fireworks go off that evening, a sunny-turned-cloudy sky that was clouded up even more by all the smoke of the display, the cannons from some of the ceremonial old ships adding to all the smoke. The park was packed, as was every part of southern Manhattan. After a while, I got tired and cranky. My mom and my Uncle Sam (Gill, may you rest in peace) — who met up with us in the city — decided they wanted to go back home, between the noise and my dad having gotten himself some “pep-up” (beer, for the uninitiated). Me and Darren were left with my inebriated father in the city as the parent to get us back to Mount Vernon.

I barely remember getting on the Metro-North train back, but it was late, somewhere between 10 pm and 1 am. I fell asleep. The conductor on the train had to wake me, Darren, and my drunk dad up. The train not only had passed the final stop. We were all in Metro-North’s New Haven train yards! They had to get us out of the yards and back to the New Haven Metro-North station. I don’t think we got home until sometime around 4 or 5 am, just before sunrise on July 5th.

I think this was the last straw for my mom. She filed for divorce after six years of marriage later that month, and had to endure two years of stalking, psychological and emotional abuse, and a potentially deadly kidney issue, all from having my dad as her husband.

For me, that was just a tip of a monstrous iceberg. Within ten days of July 4th, left home alone by my mom and my dad, I ventured down the street to my local playground, where I experienced sexual assault for the first time. Three weeks after that, my mom’s refusal to believe me or to show any sense of care drove me to go into the street and wait for a car to run me over.

I knew afterward that most of what Mount Vernon, New York City, and the US said it represented was a lie. I could in no way articulate how I felt in July or August 1976, but I felt it, in my stomach, in my bone marrow, and in my spirit.

That feeling has never fully gone away. With each of the 50 years that has passed since “Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie, and Chevrolet” was an ad campaign, the US has proven that its values are more destructive than the lard in Hostess’ Apple Pie and the roof-of-the-mouth-burning fried apple pies Mickey D’s made back then (also fried in lard and beef tallow). The difference is now there are tens of millions of USians who feel in some respects the way I felt for most of that summer, at least when it comes to neglect, abuse, and betrayal.

The general lack of enthusiasm for both Freedom250 (Trump’s heaping pile of radioactive shit) and America250 (bipartisan, but still toxic, considering the pile of bodies this nation is built on) is something that can’t be faked. My Uber side gig has given me a front-row view of both DC and its visitors over the past month. No one I encountered showed even 1 percent of the excitement I felt and observed from hordes of New Yorkers and USians five decades ago. Oh, people have been relieved to have an extended weekend or to ride motorcycles sans flags up and down the Beltway, I-95, I-70, Route 200 and Route 29. But the patriotic pride of ’76, well, except for the blindly hyper-patriotic, the thrill is certainly gone.

I had to find a way to cope, to piece back together the parts of my psyche and spirit that weren’t damaged by the events of 1976. I did, but I buried that searing and excruciating pain under the rubble of later physical abuse, a neighbor’s attempt at sexual abuse, and the general abuse and neglect that comes from deep poverty and three parents/guardians who cared more about manhood and patriarchy than they ever did about actual parenting.

The US with its perpetual -isms is the same way, and not just for kids or anyone living outside a womb. I ultimately gave up on expecting a loving adult relationship with my mom and my dad, because I learned over decades that they were incapable of that kind of love. I learned because I have been a father for nearly 23 years, with a spouse with more nurturing ability in her pinky toe than my parents and my dead idiot ex-stepfather combined.

Perhaps USians should give up on making the US as it stands now a better nation. Perhaps it is time to consider remaking this nation from the ground up. Because, perhaps, a nation that will never admit to being wrong or will never apology for its long, long, long, long, long list of crimes against humanity can never be better at anything that matters to humanity at all.