Hello. My Name is Erin, and July 4th, or “Independence Day,” was my favorite holiday when I was growing up in a quiet, blue-collar neighborhood in Northeastern Baltimore county. It was the middle of Summer vacation – which meant pool parties and sleepovers, softball games and cook outs, fireworks and carnivals and games of Kick the Can, which spanned through several streets and lasted for hours before the streetlights came on and it was time to go into the house before I was eaten alive by mosquitos.
But it’s not my favorite holiday. Not anymore. And if you know me even a little bit, you know I have to write about it. So, here goes…
I was born in 1979. (Yes, kids… the 1900s) This makes me right on the cusp between Generation X and Millennial. The unplanned daughter of Baby Boomers and granddaughter to members of the Greatest Generation. I went to the neighborhood Catholic school and church. I drank water straight from garden hoses and rubbed dirt on skinned knees and stubbed toes. And every morning I pledged my allegiance to the flag of a country I believed was founded on principles of liberty and justice. But the truth is far more complicated than I was led to believe.
The American propaganda machine is a cool customer. Subtle and smart – always two steps ahead. My history books taught me about the goodness of the “Founding Fathers” who railed against a tyrant king while spinning tales of fellowship between the “Pilgrims” who befriended the “Indians.” An Indigenous people who took pity on their ill-prepared “conquerors” when they almost died of disease and starvation in their first years on the North American land they stole. “Manifest Destiny” became a catch-phrase for the crusading prowess and power of American ingenuity as we pretended to found a country that existed long before we stuck flags in its soil. And those same books merely brushed the surface of the enslavement of more than ten million people, shaking performative heads at a necessary evil utilized to bring “forth upon this continent, a new nation.”
This country is young in comparison to many of our global neighbors. Two-hundred and fifty years is downright youthful when you truly consider history. And the first hundred of those years were built on a foundation of racism, corruption, violence, and greed—but under the guise of words like progress, innovation, exploration, development, and freedom. The American government advertised its shores as a place where immigrants could come to do better for themselves and their families. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.” But that has always come with a price. A dangled carrot of opportunity laced with more poverty, broken promises, discrimination, and fear.
There’s much we don’t learn as the “victors” of our own story. We’re taught that the American revolution was born of people’s frustration over taxation without representation. While there’s truth to that, we don’t learn nearly enough about the part where the rich, white landowners decided to ignore the treaties made after the French and Indian War that limited westward expansion to increase their wealth and enhance a new American aristocracy. We’re encouraged to revere Abraham Lincoln as the liberator of those in bondage, but his primary intention was preservation of the Union—emancipation was a drastic measure to enrage the Confederacy and turn the tide of a lethal and astronomically expensive war. And later, the American role in the Second World War is lauded as a turning point against global fascism and evil, transforming the nation into a global superpower. But lest we forget that power came from a strategic willingness to drop catastrophic weapons that annihilated more than a quarter of a million people.
We have gone to wars around the globe under the pretense of freedom being threatened. We claim to want to bring democracy and free elections to places where it doesn’t exist – full on the fat of the belief that what we have is somehow wiser, kinder, better. But all you have to do is turn the lens onto America, today, to know that it’s false dice. The two-party system – which the Founding White Dudes™ NEVER intended this country to be—is failing us. Our rich become richer and our poor become poorer. The middle class is disappearing under the weight of inflation and discord. Rabid political affiliations are giving birth to a new crop of firebrands who believe they’re crusading in the images of Patrick Henry and John C. Calhoun, only they’re laboring from behind keyboards in the forms of GIFs and memes, endlessly trolling one another and stoking the hate fires that burn brighter as they consume the pursuit of happiness, we thought we’d have achieved by now.
When I pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, it was because I believed in the idea that all people are truly created equal – not just the rich ones or the smart ones or the white ones or the male ones. Because I believed this place was intrinsically good and the sacrifices of the people who have given their lives for this country weren’t in vain. Because my Irish and Polish and Welsh and Slovakian ancestors came here to pave a path to a better life for those who came after them. Because this is a place where you can be queer or brown or fat or disabled or *makes a wildly sweeping gesture* whatever the fuck you are and that’s acceptable. It’s valuable. It makes you a strand in the fabric of this nation. That it makes you part of the great melting pot.
Yesterday, our elected officials passed a bill that will take critical healthcare away from millions of Americans, that takes food out of the mouths of needy children, that increases our debt ceiling by trillions of dollars, that makes us a lot more nationalistic, significantly more violent, ends aid to places where millions will die, and pits us against one another based on whether we’re celebrating this atrocity or staring in horror at what we’ve become.
No, the Fourth of July is no longer my favorite holiday.
I believe in a different dream of America. And it’s going to require its own revolution.
Life of Riley 