It's 1130 and fireworks have been going off for hours. I live in a college town. It will continue for hours. I hear the drunks yelling out there. Sounds like fun, but I'm not in the mood tonight.
See, I made the stupid move of actually THINKING about what this country stands for, and thinking about the nature of the American people. That's enough to make anybody depressed, I think.
Because this holiday has become as superficial as Christmas has become commercial.
People fly flags on their porches. They listen to "patriotic" pop songs that tell the pretty half of our country's history. They go stare at fireworks. People eat hot dogs for dinner. Used car lots have special sales to cash in on the wave of bloated patriotism. Senators and Congresspeople give happy shallow speeches about how friggin great America is.
Sure they tell us America's great. They're fucking senators... they BEAT THE SYSTEM. They beat it so well that now they are the system.
Dare I ask how many of the people out celebrating Independence Day have ever critically thought about America? You know, actually THOUGHT, in DEPTH, about what we stand for. About the diverse selection of shameful atrocities we have committed in this world... launching wars, exploiting desperate Third World countries, destroying the environment, committing massacres, disenfranchising women for an entire century, backing murderous dictators, ruthlessly displacing native people, perpetrating slavery for centuries, enforcing segregation, and ignoring genocides we could have prevented. To name a few.
My favorite one: that we as a nation burn trillions of dollars, year after year and decade after decade, to build weapons while the education system falters, people go without healthcare, and a permanent underclass of desperate people are allowed to wither within our borders.
So it goes.
Here's my deep thought for the night:
I bet that less than 30% of all the Americans who went to go watch a fireworks display tonight have ever seriously given thought to the dark side of American history, and therefore have never had the necessary prerequisite to think about how we can improve our role in the world. Put another way, I believe that more than 70% of the American people do not have a solid enough awareness of our history to actually critically question our role in the world, past and present.
What do YOU think? Is 30% too pessimistic? What do you, the REAL patriots, think? And you ARE a patriot. If you've come this far--to reading Daily Kos blogs the night of July 4/5--you are more engaged in politics than the vast majority of the American people, and therefore a good caretaker of our nation, and part of the solution, not the problem. Congratulations. And thanks for reading. Seriously, pat yourself on the back. :)