A Soggy Fourth of July
Same, Barrett. Same.
It’s a complicated time to be celebrating the 250th birthday of the United States. As a child raised in the DC area to a Naval Officer father and a “Kennedy Girl” mother, I was a sucker for fireworks and patriotic anthems, always the first to put on my red, white & blue striped tube socks. When I got my drivers license, I used to drive downtown, by myself, to just sit on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial, awed by all the purpose and optimism carved into marble around me. (Really. I was a dork.) I felt part of something worthwhile and inspired to do my part to make it even better.
Today, however, I feel like that purpose and optimism are in short supply. We have an executive branch awash in vengeance and corruption, a tide of greed that puts self interest ahead of any interest in service. We have a court that says corporations are people, people with increasingly more rights than the average citizen. We have a legislature that watches in silence, occasionally mustering a sigh of disdain like guests served the wrong side at a restaurant but too afraid to send it back, all but abdicating its role as a coequal branch of government. We have inexcusable income inequality smothering the dream of doing better than the generation before. And as the daily untruths about misbegotten wars and non-existent voter fraud, like algae clogging our collective reflecting pool, obscure our ability to have reasoned debate, it is hard not to ask ourselves, where is the America I knew?
It’s right there. It always has been. It was there in the enslaver holding a Bible and the treaty breaker citing Manifest Destiny. It was there in the robber baron and the commie hunter, the lyncher and the flat-earther. This is all part of the American story and always has been. To pretend otherwise is to blindly drink the Fourth of July punch and get drunk on its “now with eight vitamins and minerals” vibes.
If this rapacious character feels ascendant right now, another side has always been there, too. It was there in the immigrant seamstress marching outside the Triangle Factory and the Navajo code talker outwitting fascists. It was there in the WPA artist and the Freedom Marcher, the Apollo program mathematician and the GMHC Buddy. And this America — energetic, inventive, and empathetic — is all around us today if you bother to look.
So do I celebrate one America and ignore the other? No. I think we have to hold both in our hands, weigh them, understand them, and see that the genius of America, a country built by people from literally all over the world, is in the choice. We have always had both sides, better and worse angels. We will always have both. America, in all its gorgeous wonders and grievous mistakes, is about possibility. In the darkest of times, that possibility was barely a spark, freedom and justice for all just words on a page that were only available to the few in practice. But the match was lit and the fire was there to be encouraged by people of bravery and vision. A choice, for those of us with the ability and privilege, was there to use whatever we had at our hands and in our hearts to help make a more perfect union and welcome more people into possibility. That is what I will celebrate.
And if there’s another me sitting on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial today, I’d tell him not to despair. Pull up your red, white, and blue socks and look for what you have to contribute. The story isn’t over. There is another slab of marble waiting to go up; what do you want carved on it?