250 years of dream and nightmare

I belong to the generation of the child of Toy Story, that from one day to the next went from playing in the cowboys to be an astronaut. My heroes of Bonanza were sidelined by Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin. The United States had reached the pinnacle of Humanity's technological progress, and they were the best at explaining it. Despite the assassinations of the 60s and the disaster in Vietnam, the feat of Apollo 11 and the lesson of honesty from Watergate still kept the USA on its pedestal.

The feelings of that early admiration have been corrected by harsh reality, because American moral decline has been imposed without palliative care.

The US celebrates the 250th anniversary of its independence at a very low point in its history. Days ago, my seatmate on a plane admitted his shame in going around the world being American every time he was spoken to about President Trump. Unusual in a country that has educated its people by making them believe they are citizens of an exceptional nation, capable of giving a future and a shared civic identity to a country of immigrants, proud of creating the world's first economy and always maintaining itself as a democratic system under the rule of law. We all know the number of footnotes that question this exceptionalism, starting with the contradiction between declaring independence by stating that all men have been created equal and, at the same time, maintaining slavery, or the addiction to weapons in the name of freedom, but the success of the American experiment has been extraordinary. And there is no country that does not carry its own baggage of mistakes and guilt.

Tomorrow, as barbecues smoke and fireworks explode, the boorish, lying, and damned Trump will be the president of the 250th anniversary. A true portrait of what America has been capable of producing in recent years: a presidency far from the moral height of the best of a country that fought for independence because it pursued the happiness of its people.