Tag: https://www.thefreedomtrail.org/

America, Countries

Start the USA’s 250th party early

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Paul Revere has long completed his Midnight Ride and the first shots have been fired at Lexington and Concord, so we can start the USA’s 250th party early, right?

The USA is in full excited preparation mode for next year’s Semiquincentennial celebrations as we discovered at its travel fair in Chicago.

Quite a mouthful, although the Classics-loving Founding Fathers would no doubt have approved.

The veritas est (that’s one for my old Latin teacher ‘Weed’ McCafferty) America’s revolution is played out daily across the old 13 colonies.

The Cradle of the Revolution 

And nowhere more so than in the Cradle of the Revolution Boston.

Where visitors are invited to channel their inner Patriots, holler Huzzah and throw a crate of tea (on a pulley) into the harbour.

At the award-winning Boston Tea Party Museum.

Or walk the 2.5kms Freedom Trail to take in 16 of the sites critical to that first year of the Revolutionary War.

Trailblazer: The Freedom Trail

That there isn’t a plaque marking my time working in Faneuil Hall, or the Irish bar institution that is The Black Rose, is probably an oversight.

But we’re sure that our friends in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts will have that rectified.

By the time they invite us out for the 250th anniversary of the actual signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Bustin’ for Boston 250

Countdown: To 250

Boston will, of course, do American proud as it did back then and has been ever since.

It has an ongoing hub to curate projects aligned to Boston 250.

And the city’s enduring contribution to Freedom.

With Martin Luther King’s rally in Boston in 1965, a momentous year for the world with the birth of one very important travel blogger, commemorated.

With the dedication of Freedom March Square at the entrance to Boston Common.

A Common purpose 

The Common is the oldest (and Boston has a lot of those firsts) public green space in America, dating back to 1634.

And Bostonians are rightly proud of their playground which will be central to next year’s festivities.

Our Beantown Buddies, of course, have proved with blood, bravuro and beer that they will defend their liberties to the hilt.

The Wild Revere: The famous horseman

But that respect, of course, is twofold, particularly when you’re a visitor from its old overlords.

Which is why we observed the no unlicensed drinking of cans on the Common or outside at all.

Skyline’s the limit: In Boston

But Nick the #&%*, a randomer on our plane who had attached himself to us, arrogantly ignored the rules and landed himself a fine.

A mistake we won’t ever be making. Because Bostonians still live out their Patriot days daily here.

Which is why they would every right to start the USA’s 250th party early because this is where it all started.

America, Europe

Democrats voted Hitler

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On this National Holocaust Day lest we forget democrats voted for Hitler.

And while we rightly have the notion of the Great Dictators ruling at the point of a bayonet and a pistol.

It was at the ballot box 90 years ago, on January 30, that the Nazis officially won power.

And if that’s not a reminder for us to constantly be vigilant about who we vote for.

And what checks we put on them then we will, and do, pay the consequences.

Chilling: Auschwitz

Now if you thought that your cosy country was immune to being taken over by megalomaniacs authoritarians.

Then that’s just what the Germans thought about Adolf Hitler back in 1933.

And they believed too that he could rid them of a greater Communist threat and then they could put him back in his box.

Nor should we be blindsided by the threat from within or without as the Germans were back in the 30s.

Seduced as they were by a sense of grievance, common bogeymen enemies within the State.

And a zenophobic hatred of foreigners.

Bavarian barbarity

The first: Dachau

Sound like Germany of the Thirties… and America of the late 2010s, Brazil now, Brexiteering Britain and a fascist stream in the French Far Right.

All touchpoints for us as we travel through history and the world.

My first introduction to holocaust history was as an offshoot to a very different holiday, the Munich Beerfest in the Eighties.

But Bavaria was where Hitler had his first putsch and where he installed his first concentration camp in Dachau in March 1933.

All under the noses of Bavarians going about their daily business.

While the ‘disreputables’ were packed away to what were presented to the rest of the world as holiday camps.

It is challenging tourism but vital and rewardingly now memorials are now marked across the globe.

With permanent Holocaust centres, the biggest being the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and the Anne Frank Huis in Amsterdam.

But also in towns and cities in every civilised country.

To remind us that racism exists on our doorstep too and genocide grows from unfettered populism.

Cry Freedom

Inspiration: Anne Frank

And that was driven home to me not in Germany, Poland or any of the major arenas of the Holocaust last year.

But in one of the most liberal states in America, the Commonwealth of Massachussets, and its capital Boston .

Where the New England Holocaust Memorial  stands next to the Freedom Trail.

And that marks the key points and figures in the American Revolutionary Story.

Alas, the openness which defines our free societies means that racist zealots can broadcast their vile racism.

As happened when neo-Nazis took a selfie of themselves and put it up on social media.

Of course that should never put civilised people off paying our respects wherever we are and steel ourselves.

Because lest we forget democrats voted for Hitler… we who are still democrats.