The last time I walked down the main street in my home town—4th Street in San Rafael—was fifty years ago. It was hot and my heart was hammering as I walked a mile right down the middle of the street, straight through the downtown core. I wasn’t alone.
Behind me was the entire San Rafael High School Marching Band (Go Bulldogs!), and it was the Bicentennial Parade. I can’t tell you what we played. I can’t tell you how we did. I can’t even tell you what time of day or night it was, but what I can tell you is that as drum major, out in front, wearing that white wool uniform and that ridiculously tall fur hat, I was terrified, trying to look all … drum major-y … with the high steps and whistled commands and baton waving, trying to remember all that Char and Jay had taught me about street marching vs field marching, feeling totally out of my depth and hearing a tiny yet insistent voice in my head repeating: Don’t fuck up don’t fuck up don’t fuck up.
All the way down 4th Street.
It was a rocky time for many of us, the Class of ’76. We’d grown up being told, incessantly, that our graduation year would be an Olympics year, a presidential election year, and the Bicentennial year. Woohoo! How great is that?
I’ll tell ya, for me, it didn’t feel all that great. Costs were high, inflation was 6%, gas was still expensive after the embargoes, and the evening news was filled with reports of boycotts and bombs and war. Half of us had spent the past few years worrying about being sent to Vietnam, but late in ’75 the draft/lottery had ended, so we were beginning to breathe a bit easier on that score. Still, as the presidential primaries upped their tempo, memories of Watergate and Nixon’s pardon roiled up old feelings of disillusionment and, as I watched my few friends prepare to depart for their favored universities, I knew I would be staying behind, working part-time while making my way through local college courses with an attitude as grim as my future appeared to be.
Today, as we approach America’s 250th, I sense similar undercurrents of discontent. For those my age, most of us are seeing the progress we made in the last fifty years—as a nation and as a culture—being torn apart and dismembered by those who seem to have aged out of the ideals and promise of our youth. For those who are now the age I was back then, the paths ahead seem even more bleak. For us it was the Population Bomb and DDT; for today’s youth it’s climate change and AI. Where fifty years ago we had Nixon’s “plumbers, Agnew’s extortion, and the fall of Saigon, today we have a blistered carousel of lies, staggering self-dealing, and the Strait of Hormuz.
I wasn’t proud of my country, back in ’76. I’m definitely not proud of it now. We can do, and we deserve, a lot better.
But here’s the thing.
Between 1976 and 2026, there were times when I was proud of my country, times when I actually admired the people in my government and was proud of advances we made. During that time I was also able to find work and advance my own situation. As a skinny-ass senior at SRHS, I had no hope that any of those things might come to pass, and yet they did. Somehow, step by painful step, we were able to make things better, for ourselves and for each other. Sure, the pendulum has swung backward now, and ground has been lost. But not all ground has been lost.
While I didn’t have much hope back then, I was also too young to have seen what Americans can do when we get our hackles up, when things get so bad that we finally raise our heads and take note. That’s when we get creative. That’s when we push back. That’s when we look around, band together, and muster the courage to effect real change.
Today, as we approach our nation’s 250th (sullied as it has become), I believe there is reason to hope. I believe people are beginning to raise their heads and take note.
Time to get our hackles up.
k
William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 