I thought I'd watch a little of the Washington DC Fourth of July Parade. It was not at all what I expected. Having for years watched the Macy's Parade and the Rose Parade, I was unprepared for the best parade I've ever seen.
It had nothing to do with the expense of the floats. There were no Vander orchids or butter yellow daisies in a bed of roses. I haven't seen a professional level marching band. I don't think I've seen a singel college band. Everything so far has been high school marching bands. The drill teams have largely been healthy black girls doing shimmy shake dance routines, mixed drill teams swinging everything from flags to some kind of white pole wrapped in lace, or sticks with crepe paper streamers.
I've been watching it for over an hour as cars, semi-trucks, crepe-decorated trailer floats, odd groups of people in matching tee-shirts. My favorite bit was when the second group in the parade was the Daughters of the American Revolution carrying big flags and the first flag they carried was the Betsy Ross Flag. (Take that Colon Krapsickle!).
The parade participants were a cross section of every American parade in every heartland city of the United States. There were no tanks, missiles, or weapons of war. There were proud groups of Taiwanese Americans, Chinese Americans, and Vietnamese Americans (on a big float that said "Thank you America"). There were Sikh Americans, Buddhist Americans, Krishna Americans and Christian Americans. There were members of every ethnic group you can imagine. The high school bands were a rainbow of races - no racism in evidence.
It was fascinating the level of ordinariness to be seen in the parade. I couldn't stop watching. This was Washington, DC, but the parade was straight out of Houma, Louisiana. I kept waiting for the horses and sure enough, there they were bringing up the rear of the parade. The only thing they didn't have in the parade were kids on bicycles with crepe paper streamers laced between the spokes of their wheels. I think the parade was anyone who showed up with balloons, band instruments or a float.
I missed the kids on bikes, but they had everything else you'd see in a Fourth of July parade in downtown Fredericksburg, Texas or Sandusky, Ohio. There were Model T's and Mustangs, open top Camaros and Cadillacs with Corn Queens and Queens of Black-Eyed Pea festivals and county fairs sitting in the backs waving. There were restored 50s era pickups and huge balloons of unlicensed cartoon characters. There was slightly out-of-tune high school marching bands playing John Phillip Sousa marches, jazz tunes or 60s oldies.
I smiled stupidly all the way through the thing, wondering what the reaction of the left would be to a genuine people's parade right in the middle of snooty old Washington with Trump supporters crammed cheek by jowl alongside the parade route. Participants were a representative sample of De
You could hear 'em hyperventilating down at the DNC. It was gloriously simple, amateurish and the best parade I've seen in my life, not the least because it was utterly in-your-face to the left. It was an actual people's parade, only the people's bussed themselves into Washington, brought their own flags and stuff and pretty much all of them had voted for Trump in the last election or planned to vote for him in the next one.
And the one song the immigrant groups played from their floats going by???
"I'm Proud to Be an American...........God Bless the USA"
How cool is that?
