In 1976, when I was just six years old, my father took our family to Newport Harbor so we could watch the tall ships sail by. Since we lived in Rhode Island at the time, we did not have to travel far. Never in my young life had I ever seen my state so crowded; throngs of people made the trip to see enormous sails fluttering in the wind. All these majestic ships were bound for New York City, where they would ultimately become part of the massive Bicentennial celebration of July 4th. The county had embraced this communal milestone, despite the political and social unrest that formed the backdrop of its observance and also that particular decade. Even though I was only a child, I remained conscious of the national mood at the time, of its somber tenor, and what I noticed along the shoreline was that rather uncharacteristically, my fellow Americans appeared jubilant. I understood that all of us together were witnessing an important and historic event, and it instantly made an impassioned junior patriot out of me.
“This is amazing,” I thought. “I cannot wait to do this again in another hundred years!”
Building upon that very peculiar and exceedingly juvenile logic, I devised a plan to live to be 106 years of age, for the express purpose of celebrating the American Tricentennial on a distant Independence Day that I expected to rival if not surpass the Bicentennial celebration. It never occurred to me that there would be Semiquincentennial celebration between 1776 and 2076, probably because my grasp of mathematics was not that sophisticated. But here we find ourselves now, in 2026, looking to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence by early framers of these United States. Today, I am highly conscious of the national mood, which I would characterize as bleak, and my curiosity about the upcoming festivities is considerable.
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The Reverend Dr. 