A Troubling Holiday

I have to confess that I’m not really feeling the Independence Day vibe this year.

It’s hard to celebrate your country while it is being systematically destroyed from within by Fascists masquerading as human beings while a third of the country hoots and hollers to cheer them on.

We have our own Gestapo that is kidnapping American citizens off the streets and shipping them to foreign prisons to be tortured without so much as an email sent to their families let alone anything approaching the due process of law that the Constitution demands. The Supreme Court is fine with this.

We have a brand new concentration camp in the swamps of Florida – Alligator Auschwitz – that has already flooded because it’s so shoddily designed but the cruelty is the point after all. One of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s closest advisors just publicly announced that this is a good thing because if they play their cards right there will be 65 million alligator meals soon. There aren’t 65 million immigrants in this country, legal or otherwise. There are, however, 65 million Hispanic/Latino Americans – a group that makes up nearly 20% of the actual citizens of this nation. This isn’t law enforcement. It’s ethnic cleansing.  I refer to Auschwitz for a damned good reason, in other words.

Right-wing extremists are now openly gunning down opposing political leaders, and the regime’s sum total reaction ranged from boredom to cheering them on.

Congress just passed the most destructive and immoral budget plan in this nation’s history, which is saying something. It will basically eliminate much of what passes for the American social safety net – Medicaid is entirely defunded, for example, as are SNAP benefits for hungry children and a host of similar things – in order to subsidize billionaires who apparently need more money and turn our homegrown Gestapo into the world's fifth largest military force, one that answers only to the extremists in power now and has already shown no interest in law, morality, or the Constitution. The fact that those who voted for this bill haven’t been vaporized by lightning bolts is a sign that this is a valid contestant to be the most conclusive proof of the absence of a loving god that has happened this year, and in a year that includes active and ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, the continuing atrocities perpetrated by Russia in Ukraine, random bombings of Iran, and the aforementioned ICE-Gestapo raids on innocent civilians, that’s quite an achievement.

Congress has basically abdicated its power to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump, and the Supreme Court has forcibly removed power from the nation’s judiciary in order to do the same. We are well on the path toward an American Reich – we swept past the beginnings of that a long time ago and are getting rather uncomfortably close to the end game, in fact.

The Founding Fathers understood that republics were doomed. They were better historians than most modern Americans. Republics, they said, require an educated and informed citizenry, leadership that sacrificed its petty private interests in order to pursue the greater public good, and a strong sense of virtue across the board. They understood that historically such conditions were rare and fleeting. They didn’t know when the republic would collapse into tyranny, but they know it would.

We know it now.

It is possible that we can get out of this, but it will neither be easy nor painless. There will be sacrifices. There will probably be casualties.

We were gone for much of June – blog posts to follow, of course – and I cannot tell you how tempting it was just to stay gone for a while until it the crisis had passed and the country could go back to not actively self-destructing. That might take years. But we’re back now, and this is my goddamned country and they can’t fucking have it.

Here I stand. I can do no other.