The 1776 Project

On the power of hopium, or uniting the states of mind.

Remember July 4, 2020? Many people, for the better part of four months, had been cowering or cloistered inside.¹ For some, it seemed like a powder keg, ready to explode. And on July 4, 2020, it did. My neighbors all heard it — massive blasts from every corner of a city that had vowed to Cancel all July 4th festivities. They began tip-toeing outdoors to see: People were lighting fireworks everywhere. The world outside our windows filled with them — abso-f$#%ing lutely rocking every corner of the sky. Over on Twitter — then under ideological capture of that little blue bird — showed similar highlights from all over the country, with drone shots of the mass disobedience making it even more glorious.

“It’s over!” I thought, naively at the time. “The long Covid internment is over. The People are having their say.” I went to bed happy.

And then I woke up the next morning to the same old thing: More masks, more closures, more Zoom.

I could have learned, but I didn’t want to. Just over a month before, on a hot Memorial Day — 90 degrees was measured at SFO (!) — that brought massive hordes to San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, I thought the same thing, barefoot on the beach myself, laughing as I looked at people, people, people, everywhere, showing their faces, frolicking — having disallowed Fun.

“It’s over!”

“Yep, it’s over,” my beach buddy replied. “People are returning to their senses.”

And, no, they weren’t. It would take a couple years, and even then — now — I’m not so sure a majority have escaped the constraining Covidian narrative that lockdowns were “necessary” and/or “helpful,” insisting instead that property wasn’t seized and rights weren’t dismissed.

But that hopium: It was goo-ooooo-oooood. Injected directly into the vein, it was necessary. It showed people like me what was possible.

You deserve some of that hopium today. Take it in; put it to use. It’s July 4th, 2025 — just a year before the 250th anniversary of the The American Experiment. Drive somewhere to see a parade. Get a hopium contact high. Cash in.

A little bit of 1976 from Wikimedia Commons, “This R.C. Allen Electronic Cash Register was utilized on the American Freedom Train during its epic journey throughout the United States in commemoration of our Nation’s Bicentennial / 1776-1976.

Remember 1976? The big USA Bicentennial celebrations? Some of you might. Somehow, after the devastation of war, the onslaught of subversion, the coming-of-age of the Aquarians and the woozy cult behavior that came with it, for a brief minute there was a patriotic resurgence, a popularizing of red-white-and-blue, a window that opened a closed room of self-flagellation and defeat to a vista of unity, hope, building, however ersatz it felt to cynical adults at the time. It had an effect.

It’s a time to pop that pill again and revisit the Declaration of Independence, the “created equal,” and “consent of the governed,” and “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”? I mean LFG people! Power up.

Origin stories — and “the Spirit of 1776” is a pretty amazing one — are meant to inspire us in the fight against fatalism and complacency. The fight is to overcome inertia and build momentum forward. Our intellectuals have failed us in that regard. They want us unambitious and fractured, complaining and entitled. When we know that what we actually want is work and purpose and a bold, beautiful future.

Disagree with this long-story-short in the comments, but the way I see it, the Greatest Generation fought WWII to create comfort for the Boomers to reject. The Boomers — with their focus on personal irresponsibility and collective guilt — instilled hopelessness and cynicism in Generation X. Gen X was invited to read the likes of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States conveying the country’s origin story was one only one of theft and graft. So disillusioned, the economically disadvantaged Gen Xers then taught Millennials how to pledge allegiance to the 1619 Project, which posited that the enlightenment ideas of the nation’s founding was just cover for sinister enslavement practices. And the Millennials took up the mantle of Pedagogy of the Oppressed more fully and instructed Zoomers on how to complete the dismantling of the nation: dividing all people by their perceived privilege and the color of their skin, and setting them against one another in an anti-racist cage fight.

The only way out? Revisiting of history. Yes, it’s a gateway drug.

I think most people still do hold these truths from the Declaration of Independence to be self-evident: “That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

And also, we know better than to quibble a-historically with conventions of the time — e.g., “men” — and get to the main point of the Declaration of Independence:

“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

Talk to the demoralized and they believe what we face now is too great, too entrenched, too planned and controlled to overcome. The black pill must taste like licorice; people always want more.

No, scroll down the Declaration of Independence’s list of 27 “repeated injuries and usurpations,” and see King George III had a lot of fun obstacles for them — from internal insurrections to placing uninvited troops in people’s homes to burning down towns and even “transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny.”

Yes, it does sound a little like 2020.

In 1776, the 13 colonies didn’t hide under the covers after their socials got shut down. They said, simply, “No.”

It’s time to get back on Paul Revere’s horse, people, and ride — celebrating the idea of turning America, the ephemeral idea stated so plainly on parchment, back into a living reality.

Take the red-white-and-blue pill and see if you feel better in the morning.

1. Excepting of course mandatory attendance at BLM marches.