Yesterday, 5/20, I went and saw the Freedom Plane National Tour documents at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. In 1976, I saw a Freedom Train of Bicentennial documents and exhibits on an Amtrak train in Providence, Rhode Island. I bet there are others reading this who saw that train as well. It went all over. The Bicentennial was fun for an 8 year old in one of the 13 former colonies. Some of the middle lines in the street were painted red, white and blue. May 4, 1976 was a school holiday for the anniversary of Rhode Island declaring Independence. There were big fireworks on the 4th of July. The 250th year sucks. There is nothing hopeful about it. The language and tone of the exhibit today was not Trumpian. It was standard American history stuff. The exhibit was well-attended even on a Wednesday morning. I saw maybe 40 or 50 other people in the various lines. Maybe 2 or 3 were non-white. Nobody I saw was Black. I feel there were some right-wing home school types. The 2nd picture below is my 2nd grade class at Martin Luther King Elementary School in Providence. This is in 1975 just a year before the Bicentennial. (I'm the upper right closest to the teacher--Maybe because I was the most disruptive. I hope that was the reason.) It never occurred to me that America was anything other than multi-racial. My parents told me from the youngest age that multi-racial was good. I was sent to the public school, and the other kids were just fine whoever they were. Yesterday at the weekly John Cornyn Houston Office Protest, we got a middle finger and a "F*** Biden" from maybe a nine-year old in the backseat of a giant, stupid pick-up truck. It matters what adults tell kids. The picture above is a loyalty oath to the United States rather than King George signed by Alexander Hamilton himself. The 1st picture below is a portion of the last page of the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War. You see the signatures of John Adams, Ben Franklin and John Jay. I don't have any illusions about anything. 1/3 of the population seems unrelentingly motivated by hatred of Black people & all sorts of other people as well. I'm just not prepared to yield our past-or our future-to Christian-nationalist homeschoolers & morons in aggressive, ridiculous trucks. The best parts of our past were fought for and marched for by good people who made great sacrifices. I recalled them today at the museum. I'm going to stay the course wherever that leads in the difficult days ahead. I want the future my 2nd grade picture said was on the way.
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AuthorI'm Neil Aquino. Archives
May 2026
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