Two Hundred and Fifty More?
Good Men Project Columnist Taylor García Returns For A Limited Series Examining Our Current Sociopolitical Quagmire
Santa Fe, NM, Santa Fe High School, 1994
Our idea was bodacious. Radical. Tubular. A party the entire high school would attend. Not just a party, a beach party. We would turn the football stadium into a fun zone with games and food booths. We would have a DJ spinning tunes all afternoon and into the evening. For those that didn’t want to be outside, the gym would be open too with a DJ and games. It was going to be something our high school had never done. Something the student council had never pulled off.
Beach Party day came, and with it crappy weather. We had spent the day setting up, then made the decision to move everything indoors to the gym. It was going to be free admission for all. It was going to be fun. We, the planners, were sure of it. Our advisor assured us that too. Mrs. Lujan was our best supporter. She wanted us to experiment with the big and bold. And maybe she wanted us to learn humility—I don’t know—because humiliated we were. No one showed up. Not even our friends, who said they were going to be there. If they came, they took one peek at the non-existent party, then left. That was the other oddity of that day: the option to leave campus all together.
It must have been a teacher development day, but the school had an abbreviated schedule that day. It was rare for high school, and I recall that’s why we chose that particular day. Give the student body the option to participate in the party…or leave. And so, they left. All of them. We were left with wasted resources and shame. It was an utter failure and we never spoke about it again.
The Great American State Fair that straddled both the National Mall and Independence Day weekend commemorating the 250th anniversary of the United States of America gave me a little SFHS Beach Party PTSD. It’s a terrible feeling to throw a party and have no one show up. It’s embarrassing. That’s what I felt when my social media feeds showed me long shots of vacant fields of grass, dead food booths, and empty state exhibits. The scenes worsened over the weekend: a broken Ferris wheel, a panel plummeting from above a stage nearly killing the dancers, fair goers overheating, closure announcements due to heat, and throngs of people being shuffled into the African-American History Museum to keep cool.
Granted my social media feed was showing me what I’m biased toward, which is liberal hubris, I don’t know what was actually going on at said State Fair, but from what I could see, and what most news outlets reported, the event looked like a flop. While my student council memories heightened my empathy for the attempt to throw a large-scale bash, I took some pleasure knowing that it was a bust because of who was throwing the party. I watched the snippets of coverage the way one watches a bad accident, except I was a bit amused by what the planners surely felt as disappointment, and I was entertained by the enormous lack of awareness the commentators used in trying to prop up the excitement about it.
While the Great American State Fair was meant to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the country, it wasn’t mandatory in the same way my high school’s beach party wasn’t mandatory. People were given the choice, and the vast majority of Americans chose not to attend. Whatever their reason, whether that the party itself was in deep blue Washington, D.C., or that it was too expensive to travel across the country to look at state memorabilia, those who did attend wanted to be there, and they probably had a good time celebrating the country and their leader. I chose not to go. I stayed in Liberlandia (a.k.a. California), grilled steaks for my sons, swam, and later ate ice cream while watching some underwhelming fireworks over the bay. It was our day, and we made it what we wanted, and that was a celebration of summer and family while honoring the freedom to make the holiday what we wanted. We didn’t jump for joy at the 250thanniversary of the country so much as we relished being together as a family in a pretty amazing country.
Independence Day 2026 reminded me of the importance of traditions, and that traditions change a little bit every time they are carried out. The Fourth of July’s of my youth involved parades and cookouts and shooting firecrackers all night in the driveway with my large family. Now, I’m a single dad raising two sons and I live in a state where consumer fireworks are illegal, with my kids having little interest in watching parades.
I celebrated this year’s independence with a fair amount of skepticism. How is it that we can truly celebrate when our country’s leader has gone out of his way to divide the people, rather than bring us together? How can the holiday feel festive when the so-called American dream seems harder and harder to attain for the average citizen? Why should I get excited about a party that I don’t want to go to?
While I’m proud that we have arrived at a milestone anniversary for this country and while I pray for two-hundred and fifty more years, I don’t think I’m alone in my feelings of skepticism toward the state of our union. I just spent the last two weeks on a road trip with my sons going through large parts of the southwestern United States, and I have to admit that I saw more hopelessness than I did joy in people. I saw more people on edge and moody than I have seen them friendly or helpful. Prices are up, quality is down. People seem lazier, less interested in going the extra mile. American exceptionalism doesn’t seem so exceptional.
So what’s missing?
In my estimation, it’s one single thing. It’s the “special sauce” that has made America what it is today, and what will hopefully keep us thriving for another 250 years. That is bipartisanship. The simple dictionary definition: agreement or cooperation between (two) political parties that typically oppose each other’s policies. Right now, our politicians at all levels of government are locked in partisan stalemate. Everything is a zero sum game. American politics itself is now blood sport.
At this point, addressing the origin story of our nation’s current extreme partisanship is a waste of time. We all know why and how our politicians are where they are. That’s plainly obvious. The real challenge is finding a way out of it. Some might argue that non-partisanship is the way out. That is, taking away partisanship all together. This might seem tempting to do when the vitriol and rhetoric is toxic on all sides, however removing partisanship all together is akin to not voting. No comment is a comment.
I also believe we don’t recover from a toxic presidency with a massive swing to an opposing viewpoint. The US electorate is generally good at righting the ship every four years, but I’m skeptical (there’s that word again) that those who have pledged their allegiance to MAGA are going to simply cast a vote for a liberal. It’s just not going to happen. And similarly, I don’t see liberals voters or liberal candidates opening their arms wide to anything but a left-leaning politician.
So, the possible, dare I say, the only way forward, is through bipartisanship, but bipartisanship at every level of our being. We must somehow figure out a way to embody bipartisanship in all conversations, dealings, discussions, and elections. We have to essentially fight with ourselves first in order not to fight with others. We have to find ways to check our emotional responses to political machinations and think, how might I say this differently so that I uphold my own beliefs yet acknowledge the other person’s?
This way of thinking reminds me of a phrase I say often with my sons: We often don’t want to, but we have to. This applies to so many things: work, school, and simply living. We might not want to stop playing our video games, but we have to. I might not want to cook, but I have to. This little mantra was what helped me during some of my darkest times of life, when I was facing the end of a marriage, my son’s illness, and my own personal mental health struggles. A therapist had put it very simply one time for me and others during a group session I was in at the height of my mental breakdown: Do something. Anything.
The simple act of getting off the couch and washing the dishes, for example, is doing something. Doing something—anything—breaks the cycle of stagnation. And that is exactly where we are as a nation on the political stage: we’re stagnant. Our politicians are not willing to do anything. Congress passed a bipartisan housing bill this month, and what did the president do? Nothing.
I always thought it was interesting when people said they went “through” a divorce. As though it was a door or a passageway of some sort that you had to walk through. I didn’t know what the connotation meant until I actually went through one myself. It’s been a year now, so I’m much more settled, but the experience was miserable. I didn’t want to do it, but I had to. I couldn’t wait on one side and hope that it would be over, I had to go through it.
That’s where I believe we are as a nation. We’re like a married couple going through a divorce. No one wants to bend or budge. Neither party wants to admit fault or assume the guilt, even though the unspoken objective is to identify a primary villain. In a divorce, both parties are guilty. Both have failed in some way, big or small, and so the only way out is through.
When you go through a divorce you have to come to the table, and you walk away with something. It may not be what you want, but you do get something. Nobody “wins” but nobody actually loses. It’s a weird sort of equalization, maybe it’s more like a leveling of both parties, a kind of way to stun them out of both the relationship and the financial entanglements. It’s an agonizing process, but it has to happen. Both parties who have differing views have to come together and reach some sort of agreement. That is bipartisanship, and it requires participation.
And so, if we intend to make this country move forward and continue to see it grow, we have to switch our mindsets to bipartisanship in all affairs, and approach situations with the idea that compromise is possible. Fixed, partisan mindsets will not get us anywhere. If we walk in with the idea that it’s going to be a fight, it will be a fight. If we walk in thinking it’s going to be a debate that will likely be uncomfortable, but that we will walk away with something worth fighting for, then that’s what we’ll get.
Lastly, as we demand more from ourselves in our daily interactions, we have to demand more out of the people that we elect us. That goes for those people who are under the spell of the current president, for those who are still in mourning of Harris’s loss, and those who didn’t care to show up at the polls—DEMAND more out of your politicians. Use the word bipartisan so they remember why they are doing this job in the first place. They need to be reminded that while this whole thing feels like a divorce, it could actually be a fun beach party if they’re willing to let their stranglehold on power go, and at least consider the other side for a moment, just a moment.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
