I'm not celebrating this nation's 250th anniversary, I'm mourning this milestone of its passing.
I used to truly enjoy the 4th. Granted, a large part of the reason is because I love fireworks, but mostly it was a celebration of, despite all of its of mistakes and flaws, that the US was a great country, with a lot to be proud of.
Starting with Reagan, the luster on this shine started to dim, bit by bit. The way we treated the AIDS epidemic, the homeless and otherwise less fortunate, the ever accelerating rise of the rich, the increase in government corruption. Bit by bit, year by year, even as I continued to crew my cousin's fireworks barge every 4th, my enthusiasm for the holiday waned. By the end of the eighties I had participated in my last commercial show, and only sporadically put on my own private one. The increasing greed, corruption, stupidity and slide into fascism turned me cold. My last fireworks show was over ten years ago. I packed away my mortars and controllers. My neighbors still bemoan the fact that I no longer put on a show, and since I live in a deep red rural area I just make an excuse about being too old, rather than the truth that I'm deeply ashamed and disappointed in what this country has become.
We didn't get here by accident. It has been a multi-generational effort that got its start in the post WWII fifties, and sadly hasn't yet reached its ultimate conclusion, though we're closer than we want to think about. The merging of RW white Christian nationalism with unfettered corporate capitalism has already destroyed large swathes of this country, and is well on its way to destroying the rest. All cheered on by a brain dead electorate, one made that way by design.
There is a book, published in 1953, called The Conservative Mind by Russel Kirk, that has been one of the most influential books nobody has heard of. Two of the most important points he made were that an expanding middle class, and an increasingly well educated electorate would destroy this country. That these two factors would cause chaos as they would lead people to call for more and more democracy in our government, and more and more civil rights. At the time people thought he was crazy, but then the sixties came along, the civil rights movement, college protests, chaos on your TV every night. As the poet Gil Scott Heron summed up the rights thinking in his masterpiece B movies, "Civil rights, women's rights, gay rights: it's all wrong. Call in the cavalry to disrupt this perception of freedom gone wild. God damn it, first one wants freedom, then the whole damn world wants freedom."
That's exactly what has happened, year after year, decade after decade, our freedom has been reduced, our economic security has diminished. At our height in the 1960's the middle class constituted 65% of our population. Now we're at 43% and dropping rapidly. Education in this country has likewise diminished. While high school graduation rates have gone up, what those graduates know and retained has diminished, and frankly the same pattern has occurred in higher education as well. Reading and writing levels are down across the board, as are math skills and basic critical thinking skills. When Trump stated that he loved the poorly educated, he was just saying out loud what the right wing corporate capitalists have been thinking for generations.
Sadly I don't think this country has reached its nadir yet. I strongly suspect that the 2024 election was stolen(c'mon, sweeping all seven battleground states!) and I'm fairly certain the one this fall will be as well. Berate me for being a doom and gloomer if you want, but between redistricting(where Republicans picked up +10), voter suppression, and the various ongoing shenanigans they keep rolling out, I don't see much hope. I think the Democratic party, and democracy itself is fighting a rearguard action, and frankly we, as a country are going to have to go through the same hell that Nazi Germany and fascist Italy went through. It will take generations to repair the damage, but eventually we will emerge both whole, and In a much better place, though I doubt I'll be alive to see it.
This is why I won't be celebrating our 250th anniversary, I was born at the peak of the American Empire, and decades later I am seeing its ultimate fall. That isn't something to celebrate, but rather to mourn, mourn what once was, and what could have been.
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