As the United States of America limps its way across the 250-year mark, I’m asking myself the same question you’re probably asking yourself this July 4 weekend. What, exactly, are we supposed to be celebrating right now?
I look around with weary eyes and see what’s left of this majestically big, beautiful, and bountiful landscape being turned into an overheated toxic wasteland peppered with bunkers and backup bunkers for the rich.
I see the actual jackbooted, masked federal thugs I was taught to fear hunting people in our communities, and I see the gathering emptiness in our streets and parks and stores.
I see our monuments and official institutions draped in the same corny authoritarian aesthetic I was taught as an American to ridicule, all while the kind of self-serving, society-wrecking tyrant I was taught to despise is being enabled by the kind of richer-than-God oligarchs, corrupt officials, and self-serving sycophants I was taught to view as traitors to democracy.
I see what’s left of the world I remember growing up in collapsing into an end-times fascist horrorscape, both cartoonish and deadly, and I see the beautiful, unfinished dreams of a more perfect union and a more democratic America and a more peaceful world being fed into the woodchipper
And I see a lot of this being cheered on by many of the same people who once told us how American it was to be opposed to exactly this.
In the coverage we do across TRNN, I hear so much pain and fear and anger across this country; in the conversations I have, I feel people’s exhaustion, confusion, social alienation and isolation. Life continues to get harder for most people in our society, and it really doesn’t feel like we’re living together in much of a society these days anyway. Everyone feels forgotten by everyone else, and everyone’s right to feel that way for one reason or another. A lot of us are dealing with the effects of mass disenchantment with the country we grew up in, the way things are, the powers that be, and the powerful people who are running the show and ripping us off at the same time.
Again, amid the fireworks and mattress sales, I ask myself, “What are we supposed to be celebrating right now?” And I ask with all the disgust, shame, embarrassment, and anger that I was rightly taught to feel if I should ever find myself and my country in a state like this, as unthinkable as it was at the time I learned those lessons. But I also ask with the same righteous fire of defiance and sense of duty to stand up for what’s right that made those lessons stick in the first place.
You know why those lessons left such life-shaping impressions on me? Because they were good lessons! Democracy is better for us than tyranny and oligarchy. Democracy doesn’t mean democracy unless it means democracy for all. Freedom, peace, tolerance, and truth are better for society than repression, violence, civil war, and lies. Public servants, elected officials, and “journalists” serving party, power, money, and self over country is bad for the whole country. A society that always puts the needs of capital over the needs of the people, that is designed to protect private profits at the expense of the public good, will destroy whatever democratic promise it has.
I know this because I’ve seen it to be true, and I believe the people who fought and died for these things, and the people who taught me to appreciate them, were right to do so. And, because I was raised right and I learned those good lessons, I’ll never be the kind of person who will ever just give up on them because they threaten the power and wealth of a bunch of sociopathic oligarchs, fanatics, warhawks, and pedophiles who want to dominate everything and everyone. That is simply, truly, flatly unacceptable—and as long as there is breath in my body, I will not accept it.
I can never give up our world and our children’s future to these villains. And I won’t. I can never give up on the best that America has been and can be and surrender it all to those who embody the worst of what America is. And I won’t.
On this July 4, I feel like we don’t have much to celebrate, but everything to fight for. And it is only if we fight now, and keep fighting, that we may someday have more to celebrate in the years to come.
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