Yesterday marked one of the worst Independence Days I’ve ever experienced. And that’s coming from someone who hasn’t said the Pledge of Allegiance or stood for the National Anthem in years; it’s not exactly like I have high hopes for this self-congratulatory cesspool of a holiday.
I wouldn’t say this is objectively the worst Independence Day we’ve passed in recent memory, but a confluence of factors made it weigh particularly heavy on me, and I’m sure many others as well.
It’s been two years since George Floyd’s murder in May of 2020. Two years of murdering cops going about business as usual, being offered leave in exchange for execution.
The House Select Committee on the January 6th Attack went into recess for the holiday, after making its boldest claims of sedition and malevolence against members of the Trump Administration yet. Even Shakespeare couldn’t devise a better example of irony.
It’s hardly been a month since 19 children and two adults were murdered in an elementary school in Uvalde, and how long does it take to mourn a child? How long does it take to mourn 19?
It’s barely been a month and a half since the racist supermarket shooting in Buffalo and that community will probably never feel safe again, if they even felt secure against this type of threat in the first place. This is terrorism.
Roe v. Wade was repealed by a conservative majority Supreme Court after these justices lied in their Senate confirmation hearings to get on the bench in the first place (not one justice, no matter how far right on the spectrum, ever suggested it would be constitutional to upset stare decisis, even in the case of Roe v. Wade). Then these justices found themselves in a room with enough ideologically similar people and decided precedent be damned, We Are The Law. This is oligarchy.
In the last week, two armed white men (one of which killed three cops) were taken into custody alive and without any major incidents, while a Black motorist was shot so full of bullets that he lost his body, his identity, his humanity, and his life in a matter of seconds. Unlike the other two men, Jayland Walker was stopped for a misdemeanor equipment violation. I wish that I had the words to comment on this ghastly comparison, but only two come to mind, both printed on billboards in my brain: “Injustice.” “Wail.”
I could go on, and on, and on, honestly. I could rant and rave and bring up 1920s Germany and Emmett Till and a whole lifetime of other internalized, fucked up historical moments (women had more federally protected rights in 1973 than they do today). I could tell everyone who would listen to me that this country being founded on the idea of all men being created equal is a lie of biblical proportions, paralleled only by the lie of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Again and again I can nod heads and pray for retribution with like-minded people, but I barely even have those conversations anymore because we know. We know.
I feel like I’ve been filled with lead. I feel like “We never thought it could happen here” should be stripped from the nation’s vocabulary. I feel defeated, depressed, tired, and disappointed. This weekend, all the emotion from the past few months pressed into me like a straitjacket, and I felt myself turning into a piece of coal.
I’ve felt like this for too long, and this defeatism is not me. I’m writing this in the hope of exorcising some of this darkness and making room for fire, in the hope of ditching the woes that have kept me hopeless these past few months. I want my righteous anger back, my belief that the masses can overcome their oppressors, my raw idealism. I want to trip the clones of the Founding Fathers as they continue to dance around the disenfranchised. I want to burn the flag– metaphorically, this time.