Hey, it’s Independence Day tomorrow. Feeling less happy than usual to celebrate this year? Can’t imagine why.
Oh wait yes I can.
But to my friends who say What’s to celebrate, this country’s been racist and sexist and horrible to the people indigenous to this land we’re supposed to be celebrating the independence of for ever and ever amen, it’s all in the Constitution that the Supreme Court just tore into bits, I say Of course, all true, now what?
Let these guys do all the celebrating?
These guys?
Patch Madras?
Nationalism’s almost as bad as religion for making people kill each other, everybody knows this (read what our friend Mark Twain had to say about it). But a nation is what we live in, and as unhappy as it makes us day to day, with its obscene levels of gun death and incarceration and economic, gender, and racial inequality, this one was set up from its founding to allow (some) people to try to make it better, fairer, more equal. How’s it doing? Not great. But better than it was!
So you won’t catch me watching a parade or wearing red, white, and blue or blowing shit up, but I won’t criticize people who do those things if they do them in ways that say Yay, America, let’s keep working on this jawn, rather than We’re #1 except we’re a hellscape because of all of these migrants/gays/liberals, &c., so let’s get rid of them. Tomorrow I will grill hot dogs and drink something and see if I can renew our passports online or if I have to mail them in, no reason in particular, nothing to see here, move along. And I will read this Langston Hughes poem like I do every year (like I read Philip Levine on Labor Day, because I’m a simple soul), because it says this:
And because it says this:
So Happy 4th to all who celebrate in order not to fall into the deepest despair, which, given the last week or so, is easy to do, I’m told.
Samuel Cohen 