Post Fourth Blues

It was not an easy Fourth of July to get through,

No, everything was okay with my family.  We had a low key day and grilled out, inviting over Alison's mother, Rose.  Afterward, Alison and I watched our new favorite sport played by our favorite team, Atlanta United.  The dogs handled well what little neighborhood fireworks there was.

Family was great.  I feel fortunate and blessed by that,

But it's hard to ignore what is happening to our country.  On a day when we should be celebrating the great diversity of this great land, of our unity in supporting democracy, of our march towards greater civil rights and equality of opportunity, it was hard not to reflect all we have lost in the last couple of years.

Our nation has never been perfect.  We brought many Africans over here in chains, and kept them in slavery, the effects of which we are still struggling with today.  We slaughtered the native inhabitants, in a brutal genocide that was admired by the Nazis, one they strove to emulate in their extermination of European Jews.  We interred the Japanese at the start of World War 2.  We kept treating African Americans as second-class citizens, with many of us behaving like monsters towards them in the Civil Rights era of the 50s and 60s.

But through it all, you could sense an impulse towards greater equality, democracy, and freedom. Things did improve.  Slavery was abolished.  Women obtained the right to vote. Unions helped make work more dignified, and capable of supporting a family, with better pay and working conditions.  Recently, the LGBT community was treated with greater respect, including the ability to marry.

Nothing has been a straight line.  Slavery is abolished, only to see the rise of sharecropping, Jim Crow laws, and the emergence of the KKK.  Native cultures were put in reservations, living in isolation and poverty.  The resentment towards women gaining ground towards equality has created a terrible backlash, including domestic abuse and sexual harassment.  Most mass murdering white men have anger at women as one of their root causes for lashing out.

But still, through it all, you had a sense that things were getting better, that progress towards the vision the founding fathers laid out in the Declaration of Independence was being made.  In starts and fits, you still sensed the nation and the world were slowly but surely becoming better places.  As said in the Theodore Parker quote that Martin Luther King made well known "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."

And now, for the first time in my life, I wonder if that is true.  The last two years have been wearing and frightening for those of us who care about America.  We have watched what is great about America be trampled on and destroyed, day after day.  And with my apologies to those who have valiantly fought and protested, it seems like we are losing, and I don't know if we can recover.  Maybe someday, but not for the next generation or so.

Parents are separated from children, and there are those who make excuses for it, and it fills me with disgust and fear for our nation,  How could so many of us have fallen so low as to accept this?  It is the final straw, that one that breaks the back of my hope.  There are people who are not coming back, people who have completely lost track of our country and its core values, and I don't know if they're ever coming back.

We have a racist President (this is a clear and compelling fact - if you can't see it - well, that is part of why I feel so hopeless right now), who is turning us back on voting rights, housing discrimination, and affirmative action.

We have a climate change denying President, who is not only ignoring global warming but is hell-bent on policies to obliterate it, including the dismantling of basic environmental protections.

We have an elitist, narcissistic President who uses the government for his own profit and gain, including altering the tax code in a way that will increase the income gap in our country.  He pretends to care about workers while busting unions (through recent Supreme Court actions) and eliminating regulations that help protect the safety of workers, and how workers are paid.

We have an anti-immigration President who treats them as if they were animals.  He has no hesitancy in breaking up families, using the tactic as an evil deterrent to those claiming asylum from dangerous countries that are fragile and violent, at least in part from the destabilizing interference from the US for many years,   He has no sense of decency, and is willing to use them as hostages in his struggle to have his useless wall built.

He has no regard for democracy.  He doesn't understand or care about our constitution.  He spits on the free press and calls them enemies of the people.  He praises dictators and sneers at leaders of democratic countries.  Hsi ill-advised trade threatens to destroy the world economy. The taint and smell of Russian influence on him and our electoral process is all over him.

The Supreme Court is solidifying into a force that will value corporate power and the wealthy over the average working person every single decision that they make. All civil rights are in grave jeopardy.  It's n longer a concern as to whether progress will be halted, but of how much it will be reversed and taken away.

I could go on and on, but either you understand this, or you don't.

So, yes.  I had a very hard time celebrating this year.

The arc of the moral universe looks farther and farther away every time I look.