I do not celebrate your raucous, cacophonous holiday today.
I do not accept your fallacious excuses.
America was not built on freedom. It was built on oppression, on the backs of black people wrenched from their own homes and families, by the blood, sweat, and tears exacted of them at the crack of the slave-master’s whip.
America was not built on truth. It was built on deception and betrayal, the smallpox blankets given to bright-faced children, the broken treaties, the stolen land.
America was not built on justice. It is the nation that wooed Chinese workers to build a railroad, only to expel them by force when they were no longer needed. It is the land of Manifest Destiny, witch hunts, Japanese internment camps, McCarthyism.
America is not a shining beacon of democracy. The voices of the least powerful are suppressed, and bottomless pockets buy politicians. Your two parties don’t fool us. One spouts empty prayers and pious platitudes by day, which taste of bitter herbs in the mouth of the God they profess, and by night gets back to scheming how to rob the weakest in service of their mammon-masters. The other pretends to be opposite, but silences and shuns any brave voice which rises to proclaim the truth. After all, money is money, right?
“Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves. Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not defend the orphan, and the widow's cause does not come before them.”*
No, America represents none of those noble ideals. From the greasy, bloated, orange-headed spitwad whose hubris is now the face of the nation to the world, to the pock-faced redneck down the road who cackles at the torment he inflicts on nature and neighbors with the snap, crackle, pop of his toxic, tacky, Chinese-made toys, America is a giant, upraised middle finger to the planet and everything on it.
I do not celebrate. I mourn.
*Isaiah 1:23
