I left considerReconsider’s calendar square for Independence Day blank for a reason. I simply don’t know what to say.
My wife say’s I’m as patriotic as any [[Hank Hill]], and bear the Colors regularly at parades and other functions. But I have no illusions about America. We have had to overcome the same injustices as the worst of other nations, and have in recent times succumbed to (or even spearheaded) a growing global surveillance paradigm. Fear of a police state is based on volumes of incidents, not rhetoric or mass hysteria. Half the [[Bill of Rights]] has been all but buried under apathy, progressive distortion, and revisionist history. Civics are no longer taught, and once-considered-radical “experts” now re-frame the values that safeguarded us thus far as outmoded or morally inferior to political sentiments worthy of our [[Cold War]] adversaries.
Again, I am not romanticizing some “good ole days” while ignoring the fact that women didn’t vote, natives were herded by genocidal boys in blue, and the destiny of dark-skinned men were not of their own determination. The America I love is the America that perhaps never was, but always should have been. It is the country where a prosperous crop of opportunities and freedoms had been sown and harvested like no other time and place in history. In some ways that country is still a real place. In some ways we still believe, and live up to it, and the correlation of belief and action is no coincidence.
But today, I remind us of the past and the present. First, I bring you Danny Glover reading a speech by Frederick Douglass, originally made on July 4, 1852.
And now I will end with a blog post that says what I have felt but was unable to put in my own words …
Today is July 4th. Today we celebrate our forefathers’ victory over tyranny and oppression. Today we are supposed to wave our flags and cheer for our freedoms. But today, if I’m to be honest, I feel kind of like a divorced man on his wedding anniversary. It is an occasion to remember a beautiful and joyous event, but I am left mourning what is lost rather than enjoying what was gained.
I must admit that as an ignorant European, I am mystified by the continuing fascination exercised by, and devotion lavished on, the Declaration of Independence, which in my understanding was flawed from the outset in excluding slaves, de facto if not de jure.
Words are words, and actions, actions. Choosing to rename its version of the imperialist project ‘Manifest Destiny’, the US not only obfuscated reality from before the Civil Was, but added a revolting Calvinist pre-determinism to the whole business.
Its early colonial forays enabled the US to use arms-length methods to secure imperial aims, either cultural (the CIA and Encounter magazine, for example) or the mercenary use of domestic populations to fight its wars for it (the South Vietnamese, among others).
How long after independence did the end of the Civil War (in which many black people shoes to side with the ‘oppressor’ rather than the oppressed) did the US embark on establishing hegemony in Latin America?
The legacy of slavery still hangs over the sub-continent like a bad smell, and while no white (ex-)colonial nation has any cause for pride in relation to its dealings with non-white populations, Jim Crow was considered so important that it was exported to British public houses during the Second World War.
The ‘right to bear arms’ is, of course, a throwback to the ‘domestic’ imperialism of the proto-US, and represents a demand for the continuation of a ‘principle’ that largely originated with the near-genocide of the indigenous peoples of the landmass.
And so on. So when was this Golden Age of freedom?