The Fourth, Once Again

It’s American Independence Day, for those of you who live in other places where you’re not being inundated with fireworks, beer commercials, people wearing the American flag on their butts, and/or factory-produced country music, although sometimes we switch it up and play classic rock, because that’s how we roll here in the Land of the Free.

It’s been kind of hard to get into the spirit of the thing this year, for a couple of reasons.

For one thing, here in Our Little Town the powers that be decided that Tuesday was a stupid day to be shooting off fireworks so they scheduled all the festivities for this past Saturday.

On the one hand, this does make a certain amount of sense in that it gives both people and town an extra day to recover before the work week officially commences, even if the work week is only one day until the actual holiday – or, better, an extra several days to recover since most Americans didn’t bother showing up to work on Monday whether they were off or not.

On the other hand, we’ve already done our celebrating. We had our usual cookout for family and friends – burgers, dogs, chips, “salads” of many kinds none of which contained lettuce, and various flavorful beverages – and when the time came we wandered down to the river to watch the fireworks arc gracefully over the cardiac and neonatal wards of the hospital as they always do here in Our Little Town. We’re kind of Darwinian that way. We had a lovely time, and by Sunday morning most of the cordite haze of both official and unofficial fireworks had drifted off toward Illinois though we were under air quality warnings the whole time so it was hard to tell. So today kind of feels anticlimactic.

For another thing, it’s hard to be a thinking American these days.

The right-wing extremists masquerading as conservatives in this country are flexing their power across the nation, banning books and threatening entire groups of Americans with everything from second-class citizenship through actual elimination for the crime of not living up to their alt-white standards. American women have effectively been reduced to breeding stock by the Supreme Court, which also took the time to rule on an imaginary case (seriously – I’m not making that up) in order to allow bigots to cloak their hatred in religion and reintroduce segregation in the marketplace. This it must be said marks a certain amount of consistency, given their earlier ruling that race no longer matters, citizens, and therefore we should allow colleges to be all white now! Meanwhile der Sturmtrumper and his minions, cronies, lackeys, enablers, and imitators are openly threatening violence if the law is actually applied to them, the GOP-led House is planning to blackmail the US into recreating the ancien regime with themselves as aristocracy, and you can’t even put on a high school play these days without some bullshit right-wing astroturf organization clutching its pearls and hyperventilating.

Yeah, it can be hard.

But there’s more than 330 million of us, and the simple fact is that the right-wing extremists are outnumbered. They know it. We know it. They know we know it. That’s why they’re as desperate as they are to ram through their cruel and immoral policies while they can.

They will lose. The arc of history bends toward justice, though slowly, with great effort, and often with significant casualties that could have been avoided had people not been such assholes to begin with, but it gets there nonetheless. This too shall pass. The kids are all right.

And there is much to celebrate when you get down to it. The US is a great country, with great flaws and great virtues, and you can’t just focus on the flaws. You have to see the virtues too.

As Anthony Bourdain once said, “The fact that the United States of America is the birthplace of the blues, jazz, rock-and-roll, and Muhammad Ali is argument enough for me that we are a place worthy of pride.”

Happy American Independence Day, to all those who celebrate it.