WASHINGTON (AP) —
On the first weekend: a vision of the nation built upon inclusivity and the tenets of liberalism — a conception of country that incorporates generations of fights for equity, for compassion, for expanding what it means to be an American.
On the second weekend, in the same town: a public show of strength and nationalism constructed on a foundation of military might, law and order, a tour de force of force.
And on the days in between: a city 2,000 miles from the capital locked in pitched battles over the use — abuse, many contend — of federal power and military authority to root out, detain and oust people who the current administration says do not belong.
Today’s United States — its possibility, its strength, its divisiveness, its polarization and fragmentation — is encapsulated in a single week in June 2025, its triumphs and frictions on vivid display.
As events both planned and chaotically spontaneous play out, many Americans are frantically and sometimes furiously pondering assorted iterations of two questions: What is this country right now? And what should it be?
Pride, protests and parades
Consider two quotes from recent days from two very different Americans.
The first came last weekend, during World Pride in Washington, when a 58-year-old gay man from Philadelphia named David Begler summed up what many were messaging in the days leading up to it after months of Donald Trump’s increasing attempts to target the LGBTQ community: “I want us to send a message to the White House to focus on uplifting each other instead of dividing.“
The second came days ahead of the military parade planned Saturday for the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary, from the mouth of the president on whose 79th birthday it will be held: “If there’s any protester that wants to come out, they will be met with very big force,” Donald Trump said. “I haven’t even heard about a protest, but you know, this is people that hate our country, but they will be met with very heavy force.”
Among the competing visions of America in 2025: the desire to protest and seek a redress of grievances against the government vs. the desire for control, order — and a respect for the government and for authority.
The volatile combination of demonstrations and the U.S. military is a potent one, with its most recent roots in the protest movement of the 1960s against the Vietnam War. A young generation that would later be known as baby boomers regularly squared off against police and sometimes the military over U.S. involvement in what was framed as a war against communism in Southeast Asia. Historians give those protesters a fair bit of the credit for that war ultimately ending in 1975. President Jimmy Carter ultimately pardoned more than 200,000 people who had dodged the draft for that conflict.
Then, as now, many in the establishment criticized protesters bitterly, saying they were undermining a nation to which they should be grateful. Questions of loyalty and betrayal were thrown around. The role of the military in quelling civilian protests was bitterly contested, particularly after Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire and killed four students during antiwar protests in May 1970 at Kent State University.
There are echoes of that this week, not only in Los Angeles but now in Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the deployment of 5,000 state National Guard troops ahead of the “No Kings Day of Defiance” against the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration raids. And as protesters in Los Angeles taunt the military and say guardsmen should be “ashamed” to face off against what they call a just cause, it’s easy to wonder: How can patriotism and protest coexist?
Washington at the epicenter
Democracy has always been messy and resistant to consensus. That’s part of why the national slogan of the United States is “e pluribus unum” — “out of many, one.” And Washington, D.C., as the nation’s capital, has long been the place where the many have come to make themselves known as part of the one — and to be noticed.
It was where the “Bonus Army” of World War I veterans marched in 1932 to demand their promised postwar payments and be heard in a demonstration that ended violently. It was where the first National Boy Scout Jamboree was held on the National Mall in 1937. It was where the “March on Washington,” a centerpiece of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, ended with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s renowned “I Have a Dream” speech. It was where, in 1995, the “Million Man March” was held to address concerns of the American Black community, and where hundreds of thousands of women came to Washington largely in protest of Trump, just a day after his first inauguration.
It is also the place where Americans remember, where the memorials to World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War sit. It is where the country erected stone shrines in various shapes and sizes to the presidents it most admired — Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is the site of museums containing some of the most distilled expressions of culture — from the Holocaust Museum to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum to the National Museum of African American History.
Is it so hard to believe, then, that two events as opposite as World Pride and a military parade unfold here, within blocks of each other, within a week’s time? At a politically fractious moment when some families can hardly break bread without political arguments erupting over Trump, Gaza and Israel, immigration and LGBTQ rights, isn’t it possible that the weird and downright uncomfortable juxtaposition of these two starkly different events might be the most American thing of all?
Walt Whitman, one of the most famous poets in American history, had this to say about the the diversity of America when he wrote “I Hear America Singing” to underscore that its citizens all contribute to the nation’s song: “I am large. I contain multitudes.”
And in one week in June, at a time when the fate of the United States is being discussed in every direction we turn, the capital of Whitman’s nation has become a showcase in displaying those messy democratic multitudes to the world. For better or for worse.
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Ted Anthony, director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation at The Associated Press, has been writing about American culture since 1990.
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