April 19, 2025 marks the 250^th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord. On April 18, Paul Revere started his famous midnight ride. The Battles of Lexington and Concord are regarded as the start of the American Revolution. True, discontent with the British had been brewing for more than a decade and grew hotter in the 1770s. But if you visit the North Bridge in Concord, you see markers for British troops and American militiamen who died at that little white bridge. It was the first place each side drew blood. (The Boston Massacre was not a military confrontation and no British troops died.)

In the play “1776” John Dickinson and John Adams get into a debate about what was happening in Massachusetts. Dickinson asks, “Are these the acts of Englishmen?” Adams retorts they are the deeds of  “Americans.” Later, Benjamin Franklin declares, “We’ve spawned a new race here… We’re a new nationality. We require a new nation.” Standing once on North Bridge, I believed that what happened there on the morning of April 19 was exactly that realization. It was not the clash of one people, a governing authority and a rebellious province. I believe that, when the “shot heard round the world” was fired, careful observers would have noticed the birth of a new nation.

So, if we are a week away from the Semiquincentennial of the Battles that began the American Revolution, why the eerie silence? Or the studied neglect?

I am old enough to remember the Bicentennial. The countdown began in 1975, when almost every day was marked by recalling what had occurred 200 years earlier. I am old enough to remember history lessons in primary school when young people were fascinated by Revere’s scouting for lanterns in Boston’s Old North Church steeple and his ride to announce “the British are coming!”

Where is all that? Is it fair to ask whether the Left has spent so much time “deconstructing” and “demythologizing” American history, pretending the settlement of the Americas and the founding of the United States were all hugely abusive miscarriages of justice steeped in “systemic racism” and all other manner of wrongdoing, that we approach our nation’s 250^th anniversary with ambivalence about what the United States has achieved?

Has a land whose people went within two centuries from “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” (poem here) to a ride to the moon — and hopes to go on to Mars — lost its dreams? Its pride? Its patriotic feel? Are we going to let the Left mar our 250th anniversary with its usual pickle-faced grievance-mongering? (Is it merely coincidental that their next “Hands Off” marches will coincide with the anniversary of Lexington and Concord — a coincidence of which I doubt they are aware? Their next march is also stuck in the middle of the three holiest days of the year, the day before the central feast of Christianity. Are they oblivious to this?)

To what degree do those losses reflect a loss of one’s history? Not just pride in but even knowledge of one’s history? The fact that we are a week away from this great anniversary with nary a peep suggests historical amnesia.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” Santayana warned. They may have to repeat it, but they are not guaranteed the same results: the birth of a free nation and people as happened in Concord, Massachusetts, on the morning of April 19, 1775 at a place called North Bridge.