I Will Not Celebrate

 

I Will Not Celebrate

July 2, 2022

 

Two days from now my nation will mark the anniversary of its declaration of independence from Great Britain. We consider that date to be our country’s birthday. Most Americans celebrate on the Fourth. There are parades, picnics, and fireworks. But I am here to confess that I cannot and will not be celebrating on the Fourth this year. Our country’s condition is simply too bleak for celebration. A reactionary, ideological majority on the Supreme Court is hurling us back in time a century and a half or more. It and the “Christian” nationalist, neo-fascist, white supremacist movement to which it panders constitute a growing threat to  the very foundation of our country’s constitutional system of government and law. They are putting American democracy in grave danger because they believe in ideology and power rather than in true rule by the people. If they can they will destroy liberty in this country as they work to re-create an imagined glorious past of white supremacy, patriarchy, Victorian sexual attitudes posing as biblical ones, and unbridled capitalism enriching the wealthy and impoverishing everyone else. They are destroying the only planet we have through unbridled consumption and refusal to address global climate change. Our supposedly secure political institutions are failing to control them, largely because our federalist system of government gives disproportionate power to regressive, small population states and because politicians, especially Republican politicians, care more about power than about justice. Our federalism is stopping us from stopping them as they strive to turn our country into an authoritarian or even totalitarian theocracy rather than a constitutional democracy.

This weekend Americans will crow about this being the greatest country on earth. It isn’t, and it never has been. It’s not even close to being that. Our original sin of racism continues to rot the core of our society and culture just as it always has. We fail people in need at every turn because the wealthy control our tax structure. They distort it out of even a resemblance of fairness for their own utterly unneeded benefit and tell the lie that a rising tide raises all ships. We tolerate millions of homeless people and millions of people without access to health care. We spend obscene amounts of money on the world’s largest military. We claim that it is there to defend democracy, and it isn’t. It’s there to project American power around the world. We make heroes of everyone in the military, the only reason for which is killing, maiming, and destroying. We incarcerate more people than any other country in the world, a disproportionate number of them being Black or Brown. We are simply insane about guns, and we pay the price for our insanity in murdered schoolchildren and teachers. We have never acknowledged our genocide of Native Americans and have done nothing to atone for that horrendous sin. The same is true of the way slavery built this country and most of us don’t even know it.

So no, I won’t be celebrating this July 4. I will be mourning. I will be mourning the impending death of a country that has simply failed in its experiment in democracy and republican government. That is precisely what we have done, failed; and we will keep failing as long as the neo-fascist right in Congress and on the Supreme Court continues to hold sway. Our national holiday is an occasion for grief not joy. So no. I will not celebrate. I cannot celebrate. I can only grieve the loss of my country’s potential for decency and justice. I wish it were otherwise, but it simply isn’t.