A holiday weekend that does not feel like one

It was the worst of times. It was the weirdest of times.

It was a season of sickness and shouting, of defiance and tension, of industrial-strength falsehood and spin.

It was a moment of ugliness and deep injustice — and perhaps, too, a moment when the chance for justice felt nearer than ever before.

This Independence Day weekend, we Americans — if there is in fact a “we” in U.S. life — celebrate the anniversary of a time when a lot of people, feeling really angry and scared, decided to do something about it and changed the world forever.

This year, we mark that event at a time when a lot of people are feeling really angry and scared. Some of them are trying to do something about it, hoping it will change the world forever.

COVID-19 resurgent in 40 of 50 states. The death of George Floyd. The fight for racial justice and the reactions against it. The fractious politics of masks.

A national conversation — loud, enraged and anguished — about the place that a history blemished by ugliness should hold in the present. An uneven president embraced by millions and despised by millions.

Superimposed over it all: A sure-to-be-chaotic election season that only has just begun.

Irritable, overstressed, buffeted by invisible forces and just plain worn out, the United States of America on its 244th birthday is a land of confusion.

“At this moment, we are a country profoundly at

odds with our own history. We’re seething,” says historian Ted Widmer, author of “Lincoln on the Verge,” which chronicles the 16th president’s journey to his 1861 inauguration weeks before the Civil War began.

“There’s this feeling that there are multiple versions of a country that is really supposed to be one country,” Widmer says. “People are finding it hard to figure out which America is going to survive over the other one.” husband and wife (he in a tuckedin pink polo shirt) brandishing weapons at protesters in their gated community — and setting off a brief, meme-filled national debate.

Like Vanilla Ice, of all people, scheduling, then canceling, an Independence Day weekend concert in the middle of Austin, capital of Texas, which has some of the highest coronavirus numbers in the land.

Like the people who still insist the entire virus saga — all 129,000-plus American deaths of it — is a conspiracy-driven hoax. And like the college students in Alabama who threw “COVID parties” to see who’d get the virus first.

Is it any wonder that this is the year Mike Judge has decided to bring back “Beavis and Butthead”?