Born on The Farce of July
This Independence Day isn't a birthday for our nation; it's a funeral.
F*ck the fireworks and flip the flags.
For actual patriotic Americans, this isn’t a party, it’s a funeral.
There is nothing to celebrate here.
We shouldn't be singing right now; we should be grieving.
We should be sitting vigil for the country we could have had but may never see.
We should be mourning over how little of our aspirations of Independence have trickled down to the people in the streets.
We should be lamenting how commonplace hatred has become in this supposed "sweet land of Liberty."
Most of all, we should be embarrassed… no, mortified, that no matter how it happened, Democracy has all but died on our watch here.
Nearing the quarter-century mark in our nation’s life, we have collectively failed those who came before by allowing the ascension of the very fascism millions of our forebears courageously fought, bled, and died driving back into the sewers of history.
The moral cancer they defeated on the other side of the planet, we have allowed to make its home here:
Mass abductions by government-deputized goons are not relegated to some ancient, jittery black-and-white newsreels from half a world away; they unfold in live-streamed phone videos from the streets of this alleged land of the free, showing masked, traitorous cowards draped in the colors they aren’t worthy of wearing.
Death camps are not the crumbled carcasses of a foreign failure of humanity that serve as memorial site, cautionary tales for decent people; they are the newly christened pride and joy of monstrous men and women who have the stratospheric gall to costume themselves in the flag that actual courageous lovers of this nation wore as they expired on our behalf.
The grim propaganda military parades of unrepentant sociopathic dictators aren’t trapped in the amber blocks of discolored textbook photos; they are real-time travesties recently disgracing our National Mall.
And all of it: the breathtaking brutality against our most vulnerable, the unthinkable Constitutional assaults, the collective moral collapse of an entire party, and the disregard for the laws of the land, is packaged in a facade of patriotism that would be laughable were it not a deadly, sinful, vomit-inducing farce.
This is the paradox that decent Americans find ourselves in.
Our essential liberties have never been more at risk, our electoral process never more assailed, our national sovereignty never more tenuous, our elemental freedoms never more in doubt—and yet the patriotic fervor by this felonious, soulless narcissist, his twisted cadre of cosplaying Christian ghouls, and in their mouth-breathing, flag-waving rank-and-file has never been greater.
This is by design.
Weaponized patriotism is an intoxicant for easily manipulated people whose identities are shaped by those they hate, the neighbors and strangers they’ve been convinced are threats to be eradicated and dangers to be sent away.
With enough star-spangled rhetoric, rockets’ red glare spectacle, and red, white, and blue dog-and-pony distractions, you can make such people believe that they are winning, even while they are being led down the parade route and straight into the slaughterhouse.
And so this year, the anthems play and the flags wave and the bottle rockets ascend and the M-80's go off and Fascism quietly enters in the side door while everyone is distracted by the spectacle—everyone, except for those of us who still remember what the hell this beautiful experiment was reaching for to begin with.
This is why these songs of freedom will still ring hollow this July 4th, because those of us who love this country realize how far we are from the aspirations of the songs and ideals they point to, and how transparently thin the tether is to them.
We will be grieving, not because this country deserves better than this party and the amoral monster gorging himself on our citizenry, but because right now it does deserve them; because we wish it to be something far greater than their ceremonial patriotism and the phony pro-life Christianity they wear when it benefits them.
We see what a farce this all is: watching a joyless, mindless death cult led by rapists, racists, and careers criminals making a mockery of an America whose diversity, plurality, and liberty they despise and are actively eliminating.
So yes, we'll be loving our country fiercely this July 4th and beyond, by not letting it remain what it currently is and by opposing the fraudulence of their performative patriotism.
We will be working and protesting and loving and building and caring and voting and pushing it to become a place deserving of the songs and the fireworks and the fervor.
When freedom rings for all of us, then we'll sing.
Until then, we see the joke here—and we don't think it's funny.
Beginning July 7th, join me for SO, WTF AM I SUPPOSED TO DO?!, a week-long video series on how to have agency and efficacy in the middle of the madness
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What you’ve written is truth wrapped in flame—lament, indictment, and devotion all at once. I read it not with anger, but with the ache of someone who’s walked the long corridors of this country’s promise and found too many rooms empty, too many doors locked from the inside.
You are right: this is not a birthday—it’s a wake.
Not a jubilee—but a reckoning.
And if there is to be any song, let it be sung in a minor key, to the memory of all we failed to become.
Because this isn’t just grief—it’s guilt.
The guilt of a generation who watched the house catch fire and called it fireworks.
The guilt of a people who, given history’s greatest experiment in self-government, now hand it over to tyrants in red hats and judges in robes who no longer blush.
It is our shame that the light we inherited—the one bled for at Valley Forge and Normandy and Selma and Stonewall—has been dimmed not by foreign saboteurs, but by neighbors too enchanted with grievance and too drunk on spectacle to notice they are cheering the arsonists.
We are witnessing not a failure of policy but a failure of moral imagination.
We have let the petty men win.
We have let the liars set the narrative.
We have let the frightened define the future.
But still…
Still—I believe in the ghost of what this country was meant to be.
I believe in the quiet people who show up anyway. Who feed their neighbors. Who teach. Who resist. Who sit vigil for decency.
As James Baldwin once wrote, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
So no—I won’t salute their blasphemy with my silence.
And I won’t trade the dream for the death cult.
I will light no firework—but I will keep the flame.
And when the charlatans finally burn out—when the dust settles and the tyrants fall—I’ll be here. We’ll be here.
With memory. With love. With work.
Let them have their hollow anthem.
Ours will be the song that rebuilds the nation.
Until freedom truly rings—for all—we will ring the alarm.
Saturday is the beach clean up. I'll be doing that. I asked the city to put up barriers to protect an osprey nest with babies located near the beach...and they have! Trying to make a good difference if I can.