Independence
242 years ago, there was a momentous moment in history. Our Founding Fathers, in a humid and hot Philadelphia, approved a declaration of our independence from England owing to tyranny, terror, discrimination, lack of representation, taxation and violence.
Down through our history, we have seen many different conditions on this celebration of our independence. Depending on how you define the start of the revolution, from the Boston Massacre or from "the shot heard around the world", by 1776 we had been at war with England for 1-6 years. As with most things about Congress, they were late to the party and behind the times.
When our nation was only 85 years old, 1861, we were grinding into the most deadly war in our history, fought amongst ourselves, on our own land, to determine whether that independence we proclaimed would apply to all living souls on this land, or not. We still have not decided that question, though we have almost ended the physical fighting.
One hundred years along, 1876, the nation reeled under the news of the 7th Cavalry's destruction at Little Big Horn, that would drive the near extermination of Native Americans for the next 50 years in government sanctioned warfare. Civil warfare and abuse and discrimination continues today 142 years later.
One hundred years ago, 1918, doughboys squatted in the mud of France and Belgium, locked in the "Great War" that would define America as an industrial and military world power, for the next 100 years.
When our country was 166 years old, 1942, we had just defeated our enemy Japan at the Battle of Midway, and halted their progression across the Western Pacific, the turning point in the Pacific, and 2 years before the European front would turn decisively to the Allies. We faced 4 years of intense warfare to free the world of Facism, though we did not know the length then.
In 1942, Korematsu V. US had been decided, and American citizens of Japanese descent were being rounded up in internment camps, all across the land. While we fought for "freedom" all across the globe, with up to 12 million serving overall, here on our own soil, we were copying our enemies practice of discrimination and internment.
At 200 years old, 1976, our nation had just seen the President resign before prosecution for crimes while in office. A Presidential election loomed that year that would define our path forward out of the corruption and criminality of our system. In many ways, that election would cement America's path to Reagan, Clinton and the Global War on Terrorism, though we could not connect those future dots on the horizon.
16 years ago, when our nation was 226 years old, debris was still being removed and remains were still being identified from 9/11. A nation still in shock, was only in the 9th month since the invasion of Afghanistan, in a war that persists on the same ground today, 16 years later. We remember that time as a time of great unity, whose mistakes still cost us lives and treasures today, across the world.
We have seen boom and bust on our national birthday. We have seen murder and grace. We have experienced defeat and victory, at the same time, for halves of our nation on this anniversary. Summer soldiers and sunshine patriots, Benedict Arnolds, Einsteins, George Washington Carvers, presidents, mobsters, priests and atheists have all celebrated this day together, in common, for freedom's sake.
This year, at 242, it feels like tatters are starting to show in our fabric. We have not taken good and gentle care of our national fiber, in any way, ever. It is a rough, tough and resilient cloth that can forge a nation of immigrants, carpet baggers, interlopers, thieves and squatters (for we are all descended of one of those strains, even our "native" population immigrated).
Yet this year, we seem to be actively trying to tear holes in the seams. Things feel wrong. Babies in cages, thousands of miles from their parents, presented unrepresented in our courts, incompetent by all our standards, to decide their fate, is a raw and present wound. That is not what anyone from the Founders forward has ever conceived of as the vision of America, yet still we practice it. In fact, many cheer it, because the anger of prejudice has eliminated the grace of freedom in their view.
We have monstrously corrupt "servants" in government. Dozens of scandals individually, hundreds corporately, have been identified, documented and presented to the public. Yet and still, there is zero cooperative action to remedy it. Our camps of tribalism, red and blue, extend to what should be a shared vision of right and wrong. Factional anger and distrust even overcome shared morality and cast a net of inaction over all we do.
High officials in our government are credibly accused of potentially treasonous acts. Publicly available evidence has been presented and corroborated, but we have ignored that to argue about the bias of the investigators, that has been resoundingly disproven. We have choked ourselves in argument so that we ignore the proven fact that foreign powers have influenced the outcome of our elections. Even when government agencies, investigative authorities, Congressional committees and foreign allies all concur on the actions and illegality, we cannot come to consensus and action to address it and prevent it going forward. We ignore the question of what will we do, for false ideological arguments over what has happened. To the ignorant, defeat is guaranteed.
The entire world is impacted by our footprint. Though we pretend that there is a credible argument about climate change, to avoid the very real point that if you disregard the science and empirical data, it is simple self assumed ignorance, we know as a society that the world is changing significantly. The ice caps and glaciers are all receding, there is no growth or expansion of any ice cap or glacier on the planet, and that has never been true in all of our documented history, short as it may be. We declare the data is just ignorance, instead of heeding its warning that things are unlike anything we understand. We focus on argument instead of remediation and understanding. In fact, we roll back protections and statutes that have resulted in an unbelievable change in our environment in just my short 50 years of life. Rivers actually caught fire, smog was visible in every major city, Love Canal, poisoning of the Chesapeake, entire town abandoned due to mine fires under them. This we had stopped, this we had reversed, and today, this is what we are rapidly allowing again.
We have decided we are a Christian nation in the last 25 years. We used to be a nation of laws and freedom, established as a bastion of opportunity. We have always, since Cain and Abel been afflicted with discrimination. God put a mark on Cain to enforce it, and we perverted it to mean anything different than our exact selves. We forcibly converted Indians, slaves, immigrants. We filled tenements in every city with the wretched refuse of the world. And within a handful of generations, that wretched refuse drove the engine of American expansion and innovation and created the greatest power known to man on the face of the Earth. Yes, our greatest power, to harness and exploit the splitting of the atom, was a gift from immigrants who believed in and built on our American society, in our greatest trial.
Ours is a long, sordid, joyous, broken, exultant, confused, expansive, segregated, innovative, criminal, charitable, fanatical and sustained tale of the human condition. There is no new evil under the sun. For the 50 Independence Days I have celebrated prior to this one, it was my view and opinion that our greatest days and achievements lay ahead. It was a day to appreciate and dedicate ourselves to that expansion of the good of the world we were intimately and corporately involved in, as a force for good.
Today, I am not so sure. Too many of us, I fear, are unable or unwilling to grasp the situation we face. Too many of us live under the fear of the other, even though our entire history has shown that the other is our key strength and power. Too many of us disregard our role and impact on the world as a whole, because we fear about our personal situation and cannot expand our thought to the charity of others. I get it, when life sucks, it is hard to care about how much worse it sucks for someone else. But, we have managed to overcome that, corporately, throughout our history. Today, I fear we will not.
Too many of us are ignorant of that history, and what evidence and lessons it holds for our future. Too many of us fail to question what we encounter, even though we have easy, instant access to the whole of human history in the palm of most of our hands. The other nations of the world are not ignoring that miracle of information, to our detriment.
Too many of us celebrate a culture of meanness and vengeance. We do not care about facts, we are too easily led to believe that our most important, trusted and necessary world allies are taking advantage of us. We have sustained an increasing Gross Domestic Product for 73 years since the end of WWII. No other nation on Earth has anything near that record of expansion and growth. Inclusion, trade and fellowship with those key allies and like minded democracies are what drives the ever changing engine of the American economy. But, we are not willing to learn about or understand that maxim, because of our own, personal financial situation.
We let our economic anxieties about Anytown, USA, completely drive our foreign policy. We spend more on defense than the next ten nations combined, but cannot understand the value of investing less than 5% of our defense budget to international aid to prop up and support the countries that ally with, fight with and have treaties with us. It is ignorance magnified and stubborn in its totality. We even refuse to elect people to the government that recognize this.
We have grown bloated, foolish and isolated. But, this is not our first time ever. It is just the first time I have lived through. If you look for the closest comparison to the America of today, it is found in the year 1929. We had bugged out of most international commitments we made, we had established and enforced strict tariffs on neighbors and enemies, we had refused acceptable care and support to a huge number of veterans of the most horrific war to that date, we had elected a "business" model into government that declared it only concerned itself with profit and not the common good. At our edges, minorities were being abused and tortured and killed. Mass killings were not unusual, for no more than the color of your skin. Business was king, and riches were counted as soul.
It was a time of great unrest under the surface, growing danger and risk, division and racism and bigotry. We had rejected candidates for office because they were Jewish or Catholic. Yet, on July 4, 1929, the President was congratulating himself on the best economy in the history of America. The workings for additional protectionist and regressive taxes and tariffs were being laid. Business was ignored, as long as it paid its shareholders, it did not matter what it did to the ground, air or water. We had been doggedly pursuing anarchists and Communists in equal fervor, because they did not belong and we did not know what the hell was going on.
Yes, July 4, 1929 was a facade that would explode and crumble on October 29, 1929. But, history does not matter, and no one has time to look it up, read about it, examine it, make it make sense to their today.
Independence is just that. You are not beholden by law or society to things, other then what is dictated by the content of your character. If you are inclined to illegality, you can commit it, risks known. Independence is a wonderful thing in a highly literate, informed and curious community, for example, the Colonies of Great Britain in North American in the 1770's. Independence only has one real enemy, that is simply defeated and easily cured.
Ignorance has destroyed Independence wherever it has existed in the world, simple, debilitating and completely unnecessary ignorance. We invested in schools, education, as we grew out of the original 13 states, because an informed citizenry was essential to growth and development. We considered it our obligation to ensure that all children, well all white children anyway, received a free and firm education that allowed them to compete equally in the world. It empowered us to question, to try, to experiment, to wonder. It was the fuel of our engine, and its power was impossible to contain.
But, we constrained that power, intentionally. We neglected to educate and assimilate the teeming masses and wretched refuse that came to our shores. We neglected the investment in the poorest communities, trusting to the wise counsel of the insular wealthy. It resulted in the greatest economic disaster in the history of the world. And only now, have we rebuilt and recovered ourselves enough, adjusted for inflation, to be able to yet again set the mark for the greatest economic disaster ever. And, ominously, we are governing ourselves like we have a Hoover in office with a comfortably "conservative" Congress, that understands who the "important" Americans are.
Funny thing about Independence, it is cousin to chaos. For to be independent, one must be allowed to choose a destructive course. The less fetters to stupid decisions, the better for the cause of Independence. It has always been that way. Independence is precious, because it is tenuous, fragile, and because it is cousin to chaos, it is often predisposed to spiral out of existence.
I wonder what someone will say about us, 50 years from today on July 4th. Will they celebrate the tenuous independence we have maintained, or will they lament the chaos we foolishly chose? What will be the ocean level on that date? What will be the borders of the United States? What will be the state of the global condition? How many more nuclear powers will there be? What will the community of friends of freedom to which the US currently, kind of belongs to, be made up of? Who will ponder us?
Herbert Hoover, like Jimmy Carter, was a spectacular, charitable human being. They were however, both horrific Presidents. Their only legacy is in what they birthed upon their collapse. FDR and then Reagan, establishment of the Great Society and then systemic destruction of that Society, all in the name of Independence.
Happy Independence Day. Use yours to know yourself more fully. Maybe that means you need to learn about some of the history of our world, to evaluate the world you find in front of you. Maybe it means you need to stand, on whatever side of whatever issue, because the stirrings of your soul require it. Maybe it means that you have not been invested enough in the community and doings of America. Maybe it means you are just going to drop out.
Whatever, while it is still available, use your independence as your soul stirs you. And thank the men and women who have labored for 242 years so far to provide and grow and inform and protect it. It is tenuous, and not a single one of those people was guaranteed independence from one day to the next. Neither are you. And, now we are that people, providing, growing, informing and protecting; or denying, shrinking, ignoring and destroying. It is always our choice, every day.
242 years is so very short in the span of history. What a 242 years it has been, I am proud as I can be of what we have brought forth upon the land. But I am as scared as I have ever been about what the future holds.
Peace.
Down through our history, we have seen many different conditions on this celebration of our independence. Depending on how you define the start of the revolution, from the Boston Massacre or from "the shot heard around the world", by 1776 we had been at war with England for 1-6 years. As with most things about Congress, they were late to the party and behind the times.
When our nation was only 85 years old, 1861, we were grinding into the most deadly war in our history, fought amongst ourselves, on our own land, to determine whether that independence we proclaimed would apply to all living souls on this land, or not. We still have not decided that question, though we have almost ended the physical fighting.
One hundred years along, 1876, the nation reeled under the news of the 7th Cavalry's destruction at Little Big Horn, that would drive the near extermination of Native Americans for the next 50 years in government sanctioned warfare. Civil warfare and abuse and discrimination continues today 142 years later.
One hundred years ago, 1918, doughboys squatted in the mud of France and Belgium, locked in the "Great War" that would define America as an industrial and military world power, for the next 100 years.
When our country was 166 years old, 1942, we had just defeated our enemy Japan at the Battle of Midway, and halted their progression across the Western Pacific, the turning point in the Pacific, and 2 years before the European front would turn decisively to the Allies. We faced 4 years of intense warfare to free the world of Facism, though we did not know the length then.
In 1942, Korematsu V. US had been decided, and American citizens of Japanese descent were being rounded up in internment camps, all across the land. While we fought for "freedom" all across the globe, with up to 12 million serving overall, here on our own soil, we were copying our enemies practice of discrimination and internment.
At 200 years old, 1976, our nation had just seen the President resign before prosecution for crimes while in office. A Presidential election loomed that year that would define our path forward out of the corruption and criminality of our system. In many ways, that election would cement America's path to Reagan, Clinton and the Global War on Terrorism, though we could not connect those future dots on the horizon.
16 years ago, when our nation was 226 years old, debris was still being removed and remains were still being identified from 9/11. A nation still in shock, was only in the 9th month since the invasion of Afghanistan, in a war that persists on the same ground today, 16 years later. We remember that time as a time of great unity, whose mistakes still cost us lives and treasures today, across the world.
We have seen boom and bust on our national birthday. We have seen murder and grace. We have experienced defeat and victory, at the same time, for halves of our nation on this anniversary. Summer soldiers and sunshine patriots, Benedict Arnolds, Einsteins, George Washington Carvers, presidents, mobsters, priests and atheists have all celebrated this day together, in common, for freedom's sake.
This year, at 242, it feels like tatters are starting to show in our fabric. We have not taken good and gentle care of our national fiber, in any way, ever. It is a rough, tough and resilient cloth that can forge a nation of immigrants, carpet baggers, interlopers, thieves and squatters (for we are all descended of one of those strains, even our "native" population immigrated).
Yet this year, we seem to be actively trying to tear holes in the seams. Things feel wrong. Babies in cages, thousands of miles from their parents, presented unrepresented in our courts, incompetent by all our standards, to decide their fate, is a raw and present wound. That is not what anyone from the Founders forward has ever conceived of as the vision of America, yet still we practice it. In fact, many cheer it, because the anger of prejudice has eliminated the grace of freedom in their view.
We have monstrously corrupt "servants" in government. Dozens of scandals individually, hundreds corporately, have been identified, documented and presented to the public. Yet and still, there is zero cooperative action to remedy it. Our camps of tribalism, red and blue, extend to what should be a shared vision of right and wrong. Factional anger and distrust even overcome shared morality and cast a net of inaction over all we do.
High officials in our government are credibly accused of potentially treasonous acts. Publicly available evidence has been presented and corroborated, but we have ignored that to argue about the bias of the investigators, that has been resoundingly disproven. We have choked ourselves in argument so that we ignore the proven fact that foreign powers have influenced the outcome of our elections. Even when government agencies, investigative authorities, Congressional committees and foreign allies all concur on the actions and illegality, we cannot come to consensus and action to address it and prevent it going forward. We ignore the question of what will we do, for false ideological arguments over what has happened. To the ignorant, defeat is guaranteed.
The entire world is impacted by our footprint. Though we pretend that there is a credible argument about climate change, to avoid the very real point that if you disregard the science and empirical data, it is simple self assumed ignorance, we know as a society that the world is changing significantly. The ice caps and glaciers are all receding, there is no growth or expansion of any ice cap or glacier on the planet, and that has never been true in all of our documented history, short as it may be. We declare the data is just ignorance, instead of heeding its warning that things are unlike anything we understand. We focus on argument instead of remediation and understanding. In fact, we roll back protections and statutes that have resulted in an unbelievable change in our environment in just my short 50 years of life. Rivers actually caught fire, smog was visible in every major city, Love Canal, poisoning of the Chesapeake, entire town abandoned due to mine fires under them. This we had stopped, this we had reversed, and today, this is what we are rapidly allowing again.
We have decided we are a Christian nation in the last 25 years. We used to be a nation of laws and freedom, established as a bastion of opportunity. We have always, since Cain and Abel been afflicted with discrimination. God put a mark on Cain to enforce it, and we perverted it to mean anything different than our exact selves. We forcibly converted Indians, slaves, immigrants. We filled tenements in every city with the wretched refuse of the world. And within a handful of generations, that wretched refuse drove the engine of American expansion and innovation and created the greatest power known to man on the face of the Earth. Yes, our greatest power, to harness and exploit the splitting of the atom, was a gift from immigrants who believed in and built on our American society, in our greatest trial.
Ours is a long, sordid, joyous, broken, exultant, confused, expansive, segregated, innovative, criminal, charitable, fanatical and sustained tale of the human condition. There is no new evil under the sun. For the 50 Independence Days I have celebrated prior to this one, it was my view and opinion that our greatest days and achievements lay ahead. It was a day to appreciate and dedicate ourselves to that expansion of the good of the world we were intimately and corporately involved in, as a force for good.
Today, I am not so sure. Too many of us, I fear, are unable or unwilling to grasp the situation we face. Too many of us live under the fear of the other, even though our entire history has shown that the other is our key strength and power. Too many of us disregard our role and impact on the world as a whole, because we fear about our personal situation and cannot expand our thought to the charity of others. I get it, when life sucks, it is hard to care about how much worse it sucks for someone else. But, we have managed to overcome that, corporately, throughout our history. Today, I fear we will not.
Too many of us are ignorant of that history, and what evidence and lessons it holds for our future. Too many of us fail to question what we encounter, even though we have easy, instant access to the whole of human history in the palm of most of our hands. The other nations of the world are not ignoring that miracle of information, to our detriment.
Too many of us celebrate a culture of meanness and vengeance. We do not care about facts, we are too easily led to believe that our most important, trusted and necessary world allies are taking advantage of us. We have sustained an increasing Gross Domestic Product for 73 years since the end of WWII. No other nation on Earth has anything near that record of expansion and growth. Inclusion, trade and fellowship with those key allies and like minded democracies are what drives the ever changing engine of the American economy. But, we are not willing to learn about or understand that maxim, because of our own, personal financial situation.
We let our economic anxieties about Anytown, USA, completely drive our foreign policy. We spend more on defense than the next ten nations combined, but cannot understand the value of investing less than 5% of our defense budget to international aid to prop up and support the countries that ally with, fight with and have treaties with us. It is ignorance magnified and stubborn in its totality. We even refuse to elect people to the government that recognize this.
We have grown bloated, foolish and isolated. But, this is not our first time ever. It is just the first time I have lived through. If you look for the closest comparison to the America of today, it is found in the year 1929. We had bugged out of most international commitments we made, we had established and enforced strict tariffs on neighbors and enemies, we had refused acceptable care and support to a huge number of veterans of the most horrific war to that date, we had elected a "business" model into government that declared it only concerned itself with profit and not the common good. At our edges, minorities were being abused and tortured and killed. Mass killings were not unusual, for no more than the color of your skin. Business was king, and riches were counted as soul.
It was a time of great unrest under the surface, growing danger and risk, division and racism and bigotry. We had rejected candidates for office because they were Jewish or Catholic. Yet, on July 4, 1929, the President was congratulating himself on the best economy in the history of America. The workings for additional protectionist and regressive taxes and tariffs were being laid. Business was ignored, as long as it paid its shareholders, it did not matter what it did to the ground, air or water. We had been doggedly pursuing anarchists and Communists in equal fervor, because they did not belong and we did not know what the hell was going on.
Yes, July 4, 1929 was a facade that would explode and crumble on October 29, 1929. But, history does not matter, and no one has time to look it up, read about it, examine it, make it make sense to their today.
Independence is just that. You are not beholden by law or society to things, other then what is dictated by the content of your character. If you are inclined to illegality, you can commit it, risks known. Independence is a wonderful thing in a highly literate, informed and curious community, for example, the Colonies of Great Britain in North American in the 1770's. Independence only has one real enemy, that is simply defeated and easily cured.
Ignorance has destroyed Independence wherever it has existed in the world, simple, debilitating and completely unnecessary ignorance. We invested in schools, education, as we grew out of the original 13 states, because an informed citizenry was essential to growth and development. We considered it our obligation to ensure that all children, well all white children anyway, received a free and firm education that allowed them to compete equally in the world. It empowered us to question, to try, to experiment, to wonder. It was the fuel of our engine, and its power was impossible to contain.
But, we constrained that power, intentionally. We neglected to educate and assimilate the teeming masses and wretched refuse that came to our shores. We neglected the investment in the poorest communities, trusting to the wise counsel of the insular wealthy. It resulted in the greatest economic disaster in the history of the world. And only now, have we rebuilt and recovered ourselves enough, adjusted for inflation, to be able to yet again set the mark for the greatest economic disaster ever. And, ominously, we are governing ourselves like we have a Hoover in office with a comfortably "conservative" Congress, that understands who the "important" Americans are.
Funny thing about Independence, it is cousin to chaos. For to be independent, one must be allowed to choose a destructive course. The less fetters to stupid decisions, the better for the cause of Independence. It has always been that way. Independence is precious, because it is tenuous, fragile, and because it is cousin to chaos, it is often predisposed to spiral out of existence.
I wonder what someone will say about us, 50 years from today on July 4th. Will they celebrate the tenuous independence we have maintained, or will they lament the chaos we foolishly chose? What will be the ocean level on that date? What will be the borders of the United States? What will be the state of the global condition? How many more nuclear powers will there be? What will the community of friends of freedom to which the US currently, kind of belongs to, be made up of? Who will ponder us?
Herbert Hoover, like Jimmy Carter, was a spectacular, charitable human being. They were however, both horrific Presidents. Their only legacy is in what they birthed upon their collapse. FDR and then Reagan, establishment of the Great Society and then systemic destruction of that Society, all in the name of Independence.
Happy Independence Day. Use yours to know yourself more fully. Maybe that means you need to learn about some of the history of our world, to evaluate the world you find in front of you. Maybe it means you need to stand, on whatever side of whatever issue, because the stirrings of your soul require it. Maybe it means that you have not been invested enough in the community and doings of America. Maybe it means you are just going to drop out.
Whatever, while it is still available, use your independence as your soul stirs you. And thank the men and women who have labored for 242 years so far to provide and grow and inform and protect it. It is tenuous, and not a single one of those people was guaranteed independence from one day to the next. Neither are you. And, now we are that people, providing, growing, informing and protecting; or denying, shrinking, ignoring and destroying. It is always our choice, every day.
242 years is so very short in the span of history. What a 242 years it has been, I am proud as I can be of what we have brought forth upon the land. But I am as scared as I have ever been about what the future holds.
Peace.
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