Our country was built on purposeful forgetting.
As I’m sure many of you are, I am bereft. The “Big, Beautiful Bill” passed yesterday. The rich will continue to get richer, and the suffering of those who are not will intensify.
Today is Independence Day. A celebration of freedom. The irony is painful, grotesque.
I’m sure it will come as no surprise for you to hear that I will not be celebrating. We are not free until all of us are free, and a firework show isn’t going to change that.
. . .
Last year I wrote about the Fourth of July, and, unfortunately yet unsurprisingly, the message still applies. Rather than exhaust myself in trying to articulate what I am still processing, I am going to reshare some of my thoughts.
Independence Day
The hypocrisy of the holiday is evident to those of us whose ancestors were not granted freedom in 1776, those of us who remain unfree under the project we call America. Frederick Douglass asked in his famous speech, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?”, and we must continue to ask this question in the twenty-first century: Who is this celebration for? What does it symbolize?
Perhaps the hypocrisy of the holiday is as it should be. As a reminder that while many of us were not—and continue to not be—free, many others still celebrated and will continue to celebrate because they were and are. It is very symbolic of how our world continues today, with a select few celebrating their freedom while all around them the world burns.
The holiday symbolizes the sense of entitlement that is at the core of how our country functions, who the project bestows with freedom and who it imprisons and punishes.
Our country was built on purposeful forgetting. Our nation continues in its post-capitalist deterioration because we are hellbent on forging ever forward without any reconciliation of the past or regard for the bodies that prop up the economy but do not make a living wage.
Racism, genocide, patriarchy, capitalism; these are all unchecked illnesses that bloom like wildfire in the carelessness of purposeful forgetting. When we say, Never again, we have to mean it. We have to mean it for everyone.
There is possibility in the presence of this moment, but we are incapable of being here, right now, when our collective past has not been reckoned with. We have outstanding debts that will continue to loom ever larger if we don’t give our attention to how we got here in the first place.
We’ve gotten to this inflection point through unchecked power, negligence, and, worse: apathy. We weren’t born this way, without care for the world we inhabit and the people who inhabit it with us. We were taught to believe these things.
What is the source of this doctrine? What is the source of our suffering? America. America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. We tout our freedom, our liberty, and yet we are so frightened. And understandably so. Our past haunts us, even though we do not know it. We can feel it. And the temporary comforts of materialism, territorialism, and individuality are merely that, temporary. The comfort doesn’t last.
Comfort is found in each other. But how can we find each other when we’re pitted against one another, when the demarcation of us vs them is written in gunpowder and the cult of the individual is served hot off the grill with a cold beer and potato salad?
We have to believe in more than this. We have to demand more than what we’ve been given, than what we’ve been told to accept. As James Baldwin said, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Like most of us, I am enamored with the idea that the United States is where anyone can create a brighter future. But this is an illusion.
Instead of belief in the individual, in the nuclear family, in the right to bear arms and the right to set off fireworks in a tinder box because it’s goddamn American, what if we believed in something different? Something more beautiful?
What if we believed in a vision for how things could be, that when we thought about freedom we thought of it as tangible but not yet realized, for if one of us is not free then none of us are truly free? What would it look like to include the collective in the vision, rather than just who’s already, always, been free?
Change is scary, but change is something we cannot control. Change is the harbinger of better things to come. And we can’t wait for someone else, something else, somewhere else, to affect the change we wish so desperately to see.
The vision we’ve been told to accept isn’t by our design.
Douglass states, “The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”
We must mourn together.
Thank you for being here.
In solidarity,
Emma