Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Looking for Hope on the 5th of July




Yesterday was US Independence Day. I have complicated feelings about this holiday, as I have complicated feelings about the country it celebrates. 

I’ve never really been big on conventional displays of patriotism. It all feels so jingoistic and bombastic. And there’s something a bit gauche about pretending a patch of dirt is special because I happen to live on it. 

But this doesn’t mean I don’t love my country in some sense. I love the people here, because I love humanity and part of humanity lives here, the part that most influences me and which I can influence most. 

I love a lot about our cultural heritage. Sure, we are a country founded on slavery and genocide with systemic injustice that continues to this day, but we also invented jazz, the blues, rock and roll, and hip hop. We’ve got Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, and James Baldwin, Malcolm X and Angela Davis, Stephen King and Martin Luther King, Jr. Our history of labor and radical politics is richer than most of us know. 

Science fiction may have been invented in Europe, but we took it to strange new places. We’ve got Star Trek and Star Wars. Asimov and Heinlein, Frank Herbert and Samuel Delany, Ursula Le Guin and Philip K. Dick, Octavia Butler and Kim Stanley Robinson. 

None of this erases hundreds of years of horror, especially the horrors we seem intent on ignoring rather than facing. None of this erases the repeal of abortion rights, our madness about guns, or our unwillingness to deal with the climate change of which we are a major cause. 

But I suppose the thing that keeps me here, despite all this, is a faint hope for the future. A hope that despite the fact that our Constitution never included most of the people who lived here at the time, we could take the framework this document provides, somehow cutting through the rot of greed and corruption in our current system, to better approximate something like liberty and justice for all. 

To do this, we may need to do some serious rethinking about liberalism (in the political philosophy sense). Personal freedom means little in a system where most of us are unable to exercise it. 

We’ll have to rethink American capitalism before it kills us all (if it hasn’t already done so). 

We’ll have to rethink the white supremacism that lies at the heart of so much that America has been and continues to be. Part of my own rethinking in the last decade has included coming to see just how much of American politics can be explained by, “white supremacism is a helluva drug.” 

We’ll have to rethink the hatreds for women, LGBTQ people, disabled people, the poor, immigrants, and so on, bigotries that have always been there, but seem emboldened as of late. 

We’ll have to rethink our ideas about what it means to be an American. Our famous rugged individualism does not mean we have to hate those who are different. We need to see that diversity has always been part of America--maybe its best part--going back to the Native peoples from whom we stole this land. 

We’ll have to find some way to come to terms with the many contradictions of America: a nation of wealth and poverty, haves and have-nots, democracy and fascism, secularism and Christian nationalism, freedom for all and fear of everything, vast opportunity and stifling injustice, professed equality in theory and persistent inequality in practice, simultaneously the best and worst of education, healthcare, housing, etc.

Yesterday we saw these contradictions on full display in a mass shooting at a 4th of July parade in Highland Park, IL: a celebration of freedom turned scene of constricting violence. The shooter was a young white man radicalized online. He was apprehended peacefully by law enforcement while just one week earlier an unarmed Black man named Jayland Walker was killed by 60 bullets from police in Akron, OH. 

I admit I have less hope that we will find a way through these contradictions than I once did (although I never had much, to be honest). Our political, economic, and social realities seem too toxic, too entrenched to do anything but continue to collapse in on themselves. We may lack both the imagination to think of something better and the will to make it so. 

But I haven’t given up yet. I’m still here on July 5, ready to work toward an America that I might want to celebrate.

2 comments:

  1. It's a bit strange to find myself — after googling some opinions on why one doesn't have to like the superhero madness that has taken over the world cinema, followed by a discussion on what should be considered moral relativism and what to do about it — here on this page in the end. Stranger than that is to be coming from a very different part of the world, having at best a theoretical knowledge about all the three topics gained with the blessing of the Global Web and not through an actual experience of living in the related circumstances. The strangest of all, perhaps, is to write this particular comment in hopes of I don't even know what other than simply feeling I ought to. Guess this is akin to feeling a kindred spirit from the first glance, but who knows. Or maybe it has something to do with virtually the same bunch of issues haunting the piece of the Earth I've happened to be born and live on, different only in nuances of the historical process that define unique particularities but boil down to the single gist. So many troublesome things in America that my fellow homelanders would not even bother to consider and equally many troublesome things that the Americans are probably unaware of happeing in a place halfway around the globe, but it's always like a soothing balm to the soul to discover somebody sensing something is wrong with the world around and not losing a measure of hope and strive for the better. I humbly ask to forgive me the pathos and rude attempts to write purple. Let me only say a fist raised in the air is a sign recognised no matter place, language, culture or religion. At the very least, thank you for a few hours of a rather satisfactory reading :)

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    1. Thank you so much for the comment! I appreciate hearing that someone not only read this blog (which is not something I expect!), but that it resonated with you. I wish you the best with your own circumstances. In solidarity!

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