July 4, 1976

Forty years ago today, I was in Washington, D.C. As a part of the Marshall County High School Band, I marched in the National Bicentennial Parade in our nation's capital. I don't know how the Marching Marshalls were selected as Kentucky's entrant. I don't know who it was that went to George Milam, the band's director, and explained that the minister at First United Methodist Church had been reassigned to Jackson, Tennessee, but he had this kid who had just finished ninth grade and played the tuba, and could the kid possibly go on the trip anyway? I don't have any idea why Mr. Milam agreed to that request, except that he was just a terrific guy. He had decided that for this once in a lifetime opportunity, he would invite his just-graduated seniors to make the trip, and go ahead and bring up the just-finished ninth graders, too, to make the band as big as possible.
The immediate problem was that Dad and Mom and the sibs were moving a couple of weeks before the trip, and there would be no way for me to get to practice in Draffenville, Kentucky, from Jackson, TN. Enter my grandparents. Granddaddy was in his final appointment before retirement at Murray First UMC. They agreed to put me up and put up with me, and tasked my uncle, Bill, a Murray State student at the time, with transporting the 15 year old nephew back and forth for rehearsals. I can only imagine how thrilled he was with that assignment.
Logistics in place, rehearsals completed, we boarded the buses for the longest, farthest away from home trip I'd ever been on. Mr. Milam was an educator, so he wasn't interested in the easy way out of just going up for the parade on July 4, and returning home as quickly as possible. He planned an extravaganza that gave us six days in Washington after the parade.
The parade was incredible. It was eight miles. It was July. It was Washington. It was 100% wool uniforms. I'm not sure to this day how I survived. Hot and itchy is not my best thing. We got it done. And that night, after the parade and showers, we went to the National Mall for the show. Johnny Cash sang, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller spoke, and there followed the greatest fireworks display that to this day I have ever seen. All of this at the base of the Washington Monument.
After that, in the following days, we saw the Lincoln Memorial. We visited the United States Capitol. We went to the White House. We saw the prototype of the Lunar Module that Neil Armstrong had piloted to the surface of the moon at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum. We saw the Supreme Court building. One of the last stops we made before setting out for home was the National Archives, the home of our nation's most significant documents.
The United States' Constitution was there, each page of it, the size of a newspaper page in my recollection, in a separate case, and there were several of them. We could walk right up to them and read everything it said. And displayed above, in its own case, one that rose from a vault that reached deep into the ground in case of nuclear attack, built during the Red Scare of the 1950s by the Mosler Safe Company of Ohio, was The Declaration of Independence.
I had already, on that trip, found the Lincoln Memorial to be a sacred space. I cannot begin to put into words the experience of standing before the great sculpture of a seated Abraham Lincoln in that magnificent, open hall, on that first trip, or on another, just a few years ago. I had that same sense as I stood before The Declaration of Independence. While the Declaration largely fell by the wayside, especially after the 1787 writing of the Constitution, its reputation and prominence began to rebound as the nation approached the 50th anniversary in 1826. The coincidence of the deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, two of the last three living signers of the Declaration on July 4, 1826, that exact 50th anniversary (Charles Carroll of Maryland lived until 1832, when he died at the age of 95), contributed to its return to prominence. But it was Abraham Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address's references to it, that made the Declaration once more a living, breathing document. Lincoln recalled the breathtaking aspirations, the dreams of all humanity, and the determination to pursue them, that mark the writing committee's work as an eternal expression of all that we believe that we can become. (The committee was comprised of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman of Connecticut and Robert Livingston of New York. Adams proposed that Jefferson write a first draft, and when it was done, Adams and Franklin acted as editors before the committee presented it to the Continental Congress)
That trip was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. It fed a love for American history and our American institutions that lives in me to this day, and will continue throughout my life. It made many of those things that I had already read about real. I'll forever be indebted to whomever it was that asked George Milam to include me. I assumed for many years that it was one or both of my parents that asked for that kindness, but they both insisted again, just this afternoon, that it was not them.
I wish every American could make that trip, and especially those who are filled with such contempt for Washington, our government and its institutions, and the dreams and expectations that the Declaration describes. For as far as I am concerned, contempt for those dreams and expectations is simply contempt for Americans, as we are, truly, those who consider Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness to be Unalienable Rights for All.