I’ll be protesting Independence Day this year, same as I have for the last four. Every year someone asks me how I can turn my back on the holiday.
Fine. Let me answer on the record.
On July 4, 1776, a group of men published a list of grievances. That’s what the Declaration of Independence actually is — read past the second paragraph sometime. After the part everyone quotes about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, there are twenty-seven specific complaints against a king. He has refused. He has obstructed. He has plundered. The most sacred document in American civic life is an indictment.
So in the spirit of the day, here’s mine.
There is an abomination in the White House whom a jury of ordinary citizens found liable for sexual abuse, and whom the presiding federal judge later clarified had, as the word is commonly understood, raped E. Jean Carroll. A con man, enriching himself and his billionaire friends off our labor while he bombs whoever he pleases, all without a single vote in Congress, all while insisting with a straight face that we're not at war. Our sons, daughters, husbands, and wives wear the uniform that executes these orders, and they don't get a vote either. And still, after the verdict, after the warnings, after all of it, America handed him back the office. Not even a majority of voters. A plurality, a third of the adults in this country. Every single fucking day since has been another disaster.
There are sitting members of Congress who have spoken at white nationalist conferences while the crowd cheers for dictators and the host is a Holocaust denier and their districts sent them right back to Washington. We used to at least pretend this was disqualifying. Now it’s a fundraising strategy. What the fuck.
Christian Nationalism isn’t creeping into our schools and government. Creeping implies stealth. State legislatures have passed laws to hang the Ten Commandments in public classrooms. State superintendents have ordered Bibles onto teachers’ desks. They’re not hiding it. The people who spent decades warning about Sharia law are building a theocracy in broad daylight and shoving it down the throats of every single person in the state I live in, despite the public outcry and lawsuits piling up.
Meanwhile, the wealthiest nation in the history of the planet keeps most of its people one missed paycheck from disaster. Medical debt. Rent that eats two-third’s of a salary. Groceries that cost what a car payment used to. We’re told the economy is strong, and maybe it is for the wealthy people the economy was built to serve. The rest of us are the machine’s fuel, not its passengers. I’m tired of taking it up the ass in the name of these rich sons-of-bitches.
ICE has detained American citizens. Shit… killed, American citizens. They sweep people off the street, leaving their children and pets behind to fend for themselves and then held for days or weeks, told their own birth certificates were fake. If the government can disappear a citizen into a detention system and sort out the paperwork later, then citizenship is not a right. It’s a suggestion — something they decide to honor, or not, depending on the day.
And this week, three days before the fascism fireworks, the Supreme Court had to tell the President of the United States that the Fourteenth Amendment means what it says. His executive order stripping birthright citizenship from babies born on American soil was signed on day one of his term. Every single judge who reviewed it called it unconstitutional. It still took a year and a half and a Supreme Court ruling to kill it. And within hours of losing, the Justice Department announced it would prioritize prosecuting “birth tourism,” and the president called on Congress to do what his pen couldn’t. The thread held and these assholes are still pulling on it.
That’s my list. For now. I’m sure I’ll be adding more grievances to it in time.
The part these uneducated dopes miss when they tell me protesting Independence Day is un-American is that protest IS the Fourth. The holiday commemorates a group of people who looked at their government and said, GET FUCKED. The founding act of this country was a refusal to celebrate the one that came before it. There is no more American thing you can do on July 4th than stand in public and read a government its list of failures.
Frederick Douglass understood this in 1852, when he stood in a hall in Rochester and asked what the Fourth of July means to the slave. “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine,” he told the white audience that had invited him to celebrate with them. It’s the greatest Independence Day speech ever given, and it’s a refusal. Douglass didn’t hate the promise of the country. He hated the distance between the promise and the fact. He held the document up next to the reality and made everyone look at the bullshittery.
That’s all I’m doing. That’s all any of us are doing out there with our signs while the parades go by. This Fourth of July is MAGA’s, not mine.
The famous line in the second paragraph of the Declaration says governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Consent. That’s the whole machine. It runs on our agreement, our participation, our applause. Every parade, every anthem, every hand over every heart is a renewal of the contract. This year, take a knee. DISSENT. RESIST.
I’m not renewing. Not this year. Not while the gap between the promise and the fact is this wide and getting wider.
This isn’t working, America.
Mine is withdrawn. What the hell are you still consenting to?
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I completely understand. But I celebrate my daughter being born on the 4th. She’s going to be 40 tomorrow.
I hadn't thought this deeply about the holiday, though I've read the Declaration in its entirety several times. You're 100% right, Evie. We're going to spend tomorrow with kids and grandkids, which is always a reason to celebrate. I'll see if I can find a time to explain that I feel this way to them.