What are they celebrating?

"You may rejoice, I must mourn ... I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. " - Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July" (July 5, 1852)

As I sit here at home with the sound of fireworks all around the neighborhood I find myself wondering what is being celebrated this Fourth of July. Is it the birth of an American dictatorship out of the ashes of American democracy? Is it the death of the American dream and in its place an American nightmare?  Or is it the exploding budget of a paramilitary secret police that will roam the streets of the US, kidnapping and disappearing anyone they don't believe looks "American" enough? You know, so that Republicans can Make America White Again through ethnic cleansing.

We don't have rights because we're American: we're Americans because we recognize that all people have inalienable rights, and the government is only legitimate to the extent that it protects and preserves those rights. Or, at least, that's how it was supposed to work in pre-MAGA America. Under the new form of government that is taking shape, we don't have rights, we have privileges that are bestowed to us by Dear Leader (or as his followers disgustingly call him - "Daddy") and they are very much alienable. Any dissent, any independence of will that the Leader does not approve of will lead to a loss of liberty through various means of intimidation, threat, harassment, and/or persecution.

A substantial number of Americans, basically all Republican voters, believe that this nation's troubles can be solved by eliminating from the population one category of persons, a group that our mentally faltering Dear Leader has demonized as violent subhuman monsters (who eat pets and geese.) We are now disappearing these people with malice and no due process to places that will imprison them forever or where they are likely to be killed or tortured; and now we are going to build a nationwide system of concentration camps, having budgeted more for this than the entire federal penitentiary budget. A close adviser to Dear Leader has already "joked" about killing 65 million people (the entire US Latino population, so genocide.) I would ask my fellow Americans who are in favor of this to flip through some history books and see if they can find examples of what happens when a country goes down this road, when it believes it has no choice but to eliminate a segment of the population. Is this what you want?

Earlier today I had someone tell me not to worry because they won't come for me. That's not how it's supposed to work, I answered. (Nevermind that Dear Leader has already expressed the intent to deport citizens and his intention to strip people of citizenship by fiat.) Either we all have guaranteed rights or we all don't have them. As Thomas Paine put it: "He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." If rights can arbitrarily be abrogated for someone it can be for anyone. More broadly: if we don't see ourselves in the oppressed or persecuted then we foster an environment where injustice thrives. What say you, Robert Green Ingersoll:

It is by imagination that we put ourselves in the place of another. When the whigs of that faculty are folded, the master does not put himself in the place of the slave; the tyrant is not locked in the dungeon, chained with his victim. The inquisitor did not feel the flames that devoured the martyr. The imaginative man, giving to the beggar, gives to himself. Those who feel indignant at the perpetration of wrong, feel for the instant that they are the victims; and when they attack the aggressor they feel that they are defending themselves. Love and pity are the children of the imagination.

Or what else can we celebrate? The children that are and will die of preventable diseases because our healthcare system has been handed over to RFK Jr, basically an older version of the Liver King, a wellness influencer who promotes supplements in place of medicine with no medical expertise who does not acknowledge the reality of germ theory. 

Or is it this regressive Defund America budget bill that was signed into law today? Something that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

Or is it the estimated 14 million people we've sentenced to death over the next five years, blood sacrifices we're making to Ayn Rand's ghost.

The renaming of military bases after Confederates, men who fought and killed Americans for what they believed was their God given right to own black people as slaves and Dear Leader speaking out against a federal holiday that celebrates the end of slavery. Is that what the fireworks are for?