Reflections on our Bicentennial in Troy and America

Hardly seems possible that the Bicentennial Celebration was fifty years ago! I was 23,
newly hired as a fulltime staff member at WTBF-AM, married just a year and a half to
Troy native Becky Griffin Kirby. We were so excited to observe this momentous
occasion, and Troy was pulling out all the stops!
Dr. David Dye, chair of the Theater Department at Troy State University, arranged for
costumed actors to preform great scenes and speeches from the American Revolution,
on a specially-built stage in the middle of Memorial Stadium (which seated a few
thousand people and had a real grass field.)
There were special musical events at many churches, the TSU Summer Band (made up
of grad students attending summer classes, like me) played a concert, and of course
the city built a new park on 231 with a gazebo in the middle for special events. (That
Bicentennial Park would be festooned with yellow ribbons in the aftermath of Operation
Desert Storm, but that was many years to come.)
The radio station was playing patriotic music with live DJs all the time we were on the
air from the Morning Show to sign-off of Nightflight. The Troy Messenger had special
articles for each edition, plus announcements of all the events of community clubs,
churches, and organizations (as did WTBF).
Most of all we were proud to be Americans, and to have lived at a time when this
celebration was being observed across the country. As a nation we needed something
to bring us together in the aftermath of Watergate and Vietnam, and the Bicentennial
was ideal. For that time we weren’t Democrats or Republicans, conservatives or
liberals, old or new, one ethnicity or the other: we were just plain Americans, and proud
of it.
Here we are fifty years later. That time went very fast! We weathered a lot more storms,
beat the communists and won the Cold War, got sucker-punched by Muslim terrorists,
had good politicians and not-so-good ones (everyone has an opinion as to which ones
those were, which is one of the great things about being Americans: we have the
privilege of arguing about politics, which the vast majority of people who have ever lived
on this planet could not safely do.) We got the Internet, celebrated the Space Shuttle
Program, lost Elvis and a bunch of others but got new ones too, survived the time stolen
by COVID and got a glimpse of totalitarian government here at home, and came out
wiser.
Happy Birthday, America! You are still the best government on the planet, with all your
flaws and faults. Not because I say it, but because history has proved it.