April 19th 1775
When I woke up yesterday morning, I knew I wanted to get outside, to stretch my legs, to breathe fresh air. But I didn’t know where I would go.
After working through my morning, I ended up on the All Trails website in the afternoon and began scanning the map surrounding Boston. When I came across Minute Man National Historical Park, my US history fascination was piqued, so I zoomed-in to check out the park’s trails and after a few clicks, I ended up on the park’s website.
That’s when, below the customary COVID-19 disclaimer, a date caught my eye — April 19th, 1775.
Yesterday was the 245th anniversary of “the shot heard round the world”, the beginning of the American Revolution! I took the sign for what it was worth, grabbed my keys and headed out the door towards Concord. About a half hour later, I pulled into the visitors’ lot for the Old North Bridge, parked my car and began to make my way towards one of the most significant sites in our country’s history. But I didn’t even make it out of the parking lot before fate intervened again…
My Sunday had started on a Zoom call hosted by Claire — a Detroit friend who now lives in Seattle — aptly called Coffee & Movement. It’s a casual space for people to begin their days by rolling around on their yoga mats with coffee in hand (it’s not as precarious as I make it out to be, I promise). Now, I’ve gotten used to my world being small, so I almost wasn’t surprised when I joined her call for the first time a week ago to find a mutual friend, Lauren, on it. Lauren and I knew each other from both doing the same AmeriCorps program in Boston and playing frisbee together on the beaches of New Jersey, in fact we were calling in a few miles apart here in Cambridge. For anyone trying to triangulate this at home, you are correct, the three of our lives had never crossed at the same point prior to Claire’s call. Ah, the serendipity of a geographically distributed, yet virtually interconnected world.
…that’s why, when I was came across Lauren and her partner, Gabe, idling on their bikes in that parking lot, I was caught completely off guard. Somehow our days had unknowingly taken us from our virtually connected living rooms in Cambridge to a crossroads in Concord. They had ridden their bikes, while I had driven, but chance had put us at the same place at the same time. It was the second time in over five weeks of social distancing that I had caught up with someone I know in-person. I left the conversation, cup refilled, hopeful that things will be okay after all this is over.
After they headed back on their way to Cambridge, I continued onto the bridge. I’ve been reflecting a lot on freedom and what that means in modern America over the past week, as I’m sure a lot of us have, in consideration of the state-level lockdown protests happening at capitol buildings across the country. Nearly 250 years ago, those acts of civil disobedience and resistance might have been considered patriotic; they could have been akin to “the resolve of citizens willing to risk their lives for the ideals of liberty and self-determination” in standing up to a tyrannical, over-reaching and unrepresentative government, but not necessarily today.
Personally, I fall into the camp that views these protests as a ridiculous endangerment to our public health, but regardless, they do indicate the profound paradox we find ourselves in today. Trust in government is so low and our two-party system is so incredibly polarized that, depending on who you ask, both Democrats and Republicans seem to represent different sides of the same corrupt, out-of-touch, and overbearing, yet ineffective political machine that needs to be overthrown. Whether we realize it or not, we are fighting the same battle, we have just been manipulated and coerced into doing it on different, somehow opposing fronts.
I’ve learned to carry myself with a certain solemnity and reverence when visiting historical sites of profound catalyst, resonance and change, as I’ve visited them more frequently in recent years. I spent about an hour walking the Old North Bridge and surrounding grounds, and they left me with a throughline from our struggle today to the one that began on that day 245 years ago.
As the story goes, on the morning of April 19th, 1775, 400 Colonists stood their ground against about 100 advancing British Regulars and were ordered to fire. Over the course of that day, they were joined by nearly 3,600 other colonial militiamen from neighboring towns along the Battle Road as they forced the British army to retreat back to Boston, winning their first victory of the American Revolution. They were Americans united in common cause against a common enemy in defense of their own lives, land and communities.
This country was founded and has been repeatedly won through the persistent and unifying fight for our freedoms, our representation, our independence, our legitimacy, our manifested destiny, our Union, our emancipation, our voting rights, our labor rights, our civil rights and onward to today’s struggle against unprecedented modern social, economic and environmental strife.
As someone who has spent most of his adult life trying to find common ground and build consensus towards common cause with broad, diverse groups of people, I struggle to find it today; I struggle to find solidarity between people who think as I do and those who don’t necessarily. I’m holding out hope for the moment, catalyst, the “shot” that brings us all together and unites us; I hope you are too.
