Patriots’ Day 2024: What we’re celebrating. Why it’s worth protecting | Analysis

Big ideas often start in the smallest of places.

Shortly before dawn on Monday morning, re-enactors, some dressed as British Redcoats, some as Colonial militiamen, massed on Lexington’s town green to pay tribute to those who fell in April 1775 as the first shots of what became the American war for independence shattered the early-morning stillness.

The British soldiers who marched into Lexington 249 years ago couldn’t have known they were firing the opening volleys in a fight that would change the course of history.

And, as that same history has shown us, that eventual Colonial victory was by no means always assured. It would take luck, skill, and the timely assistance of foreign allies, to make it happen.

Taking to X on Monday morning, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, who was among those who gathered on Lexington’s Battle Green, alluded to that history — and to the year of historical observances to come, as the United States observes the 250th anniversary of its independence.

“What a glorious morning for America! The best way to kick off Patriots’ Day is in Lexington watching the reenactment on the Battle Green,” Healey wrote. “Even more excited to celebrate 250 years of revolutionary history in Massachusetts next year!”

I’ve been lucky enough to live and work in three places — Washington D.C, Pennsylvania, and now Massachusetts – that have played a pivotal role in America’s foundation myth.

All are special in their own way.

Late on a chokingly humid night in August, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial on the Tidal Basin, is a secular cathedral. The statue of America’s third president looms overhead. It’s lit in the darkness of late summer, with all the young nation’s promises and still-to-be-resolved contradictions wrapped into one person.

A mile or so away, the memorial to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King is both a testament to the progress since the Founding Generation, and the frustrating distance that remains to be closed.

And as inspiring as Independence Hall in Philadelphia can be, the battlefield at Gettysburg, some 140 miles away, is as haunting.

Just 80 years span the distance between the final Colonial victory at Yorktown and the turning point of a bloody civil war that tore the same country apart.

And all are reminders that the stories we tell about ourselves, the myths we share about the nation’s foundation, and who had a seat at the table of power and who did not, matter as much now as they did back then.

Nearly two-thirds of respondents to a GBH News/CommonWealth Beacon poll, conducted by the MassINC Polling Group, believe that violence is very or somewhat likely this election year, MassLive previously reported.

“The thing that really sticks out to me is just the number of demographic groups where this is a majority,” Steve Koczela, the president of the MassINC Polling Group, told WGBH. “There’s really not anybody who thinks everything is going great right now.”

Worse, some of us think we may not survive each other. And a new hit movie, A24′s “Civil War”grimly and unflinchingly imagines what that future might be like if it does happen.

So what happened? And where do we go next?

Whole books have been written about our national malaise and the forces that are driving the polarization of our politics and our relationships with each other.

”So here, then, is the last [50] years of American politics summarized: we became more consistent in the party we vote for not because we came to like our party more—indeed, we’ve come to like the parties we vote for less—but because we came to dislike the opposing party more. Even as hope and change sputter, fear and loathing proceed,” the journalist Ezra Klein wrote in his 2020 exploration “Why We’re Polarized.”

And with the most consequential presidential election in American history since, well, the last one, now months away, that disaffection is evident.

Americans are split, 50-50, in their belief that both current President Joe Biden, the Democrat, and former President Donald Trump, the Republican, each have done more harm than good, according to a recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll.

So is there a way back? Is there a way to span the divide?

I’d argue that it starts with remembering that there’s more that unites us than divides us.

That person you disagree with on the Big Issue that matters to you most? They also take their kids to school. They also sweat the bills. They often look to a higher power for guidance. And they also worry whether things are going to get better.

Writing about Jefferson in his 2013 biography “Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power,” the historian Jon Meacham wrote that the chief author of American independence “believed in the virtues of civility, understanding that they were the most required when they were the least convenient.”

In our superheated age, that kind of grace and understanding seems like a towering ask. But it is not an impossible one.

Think about the people who gathered on Lexington’s Battle Green on Monday morning. They might have disagreed on our politics now. But it seems certain that all of them believed in the promise of an emerging nation.

This Patriots’ Day gives us the opportunity to remember that, and to protect it.

Because we might not notice it’s gone until it’s too late.