What it is to be an American

The 4th of July

This is really long, but I spent 2 hours writing it yesterday. I got 2 comments and one was my sister, so I'm going to try again. 😩

The 4th of July
America's Good Bye Tour

As We The People get ready to “celebrate” the 4th of July, also known as Independence Day, we've got to ask ourselves what it means to be an American. We went to great lengths to get our “freedom”. We fled to another continent, killed or imprisoned all the people that already lived here. We're talking full on genocide. Then we stole a whole lot of African people, threw them in the bottom of ships like they were not sentient beings, just things, property, like we have always treated animals. We brought them to our newly stolen lands and enslaved them. Pretty cool so far. Then we fought some more wars so we could steal more land from Mexico.

We fought the British, we fought the French, we fought the Spaniards, and in the end “We won our Independence”. We went about making rich white men richer, a theme in our great country, women were of course just chattel, (white chattel had it better than brown or black chattel) we fought each other in the civil war, which never ended. Then we patted ourselves on the back, begged for poor white people to immigrate here from all over Europe and become wage slaves. We continued to go about our purpose of making white men richer and telling ourselves that we were a great country. More free and better in any way you could imagine. The concept of false pride comes to mind.

Eventually, we got to see the horrors of WWI, then Hitler came to power. We were like, oh hell no, we aren't getting involved in that business. Help the Jews fleeing from Germany? Oh hell no, again. Eventually, Japan said, “watch this”. So, we had no choice. Young men, including my father and his brothers and every able bodied boy joined the fight. By now I wonder if we can even count the number of lives lost in horrible violent wars. So, we developed a way to kill more people all at once without killing anymore of “our” people. We dropped nuclear bombs on big cities in Japan, when all was said and done, almost 300,000 Japanese citizens were killed. Are we great yet?

Then we went back to making white men richer again. We accidentally created a middle class of people. Now we were great, right? Well, a middle class for white people anyway. Then came the 1960's. Black people had had enough of this BS and started to revolt. Peacefully. So, we just beat the living hell out of them some more, until television came along and the whole world could see our greatness. Some of us didn't feel so great about this when we saw what this really looked like. There were some major battles won for black people in America, women, and for LGBTQ+ people.

So, we got into another war, put these newly freed black boys on the front line to fight for their country, put all the boys we could draft right behind them, and we got to watch live every evening with Walter Cronkite how many of these boys died each day. Every evening at dinner we watched the flag draped coffins unloaded from the planes. Finally, there were witnesses and our youth rose up and said, Oh Hell No! Our government killed a few of us, but there was that nasty journalism thing there again, to show the whole world our greatness. To show us what we looked like being great. The children woke up the whole nation. We started to pass laws for equality, we started to notice that we were ravaging our planet and needed to stop. Truly good things started to be the norm, for most of us, at least we thought that Good was the new norm and this naive youth thought it would just keep getting better. America's enlightenment, if you will. I mean once you see the light who would want to return to darkness?

So, America, as most of us just try to get on with our lives and act like nothing is wrong with deputizing proud boys and pardoned January 6 violent criminals and having them terrorize, beat and disappear our neighbors, friends, relatives and fellow citizens. We have elected a mad man who already tried to overthrow the country once, has never made an honest penny in his life, has raped countless women and pubescent girls over the years, broken every law a president could break, and now bombed Iran, (hardly an exhaustive list of his sins) Well, lets celebrate by spending our hard earned wages on pretend bombs, that terrorize those soldiers (who survived the wars they fought for more money for rich white men), and our pets and the dwindling wildlife, who apparently just don't count anyway. Let's creep back into the darkness with all our freedom, independence and false pride. It was a nice story we told ourselves. Now turn off the lights so we can go back to sleep and dream of being great again.