I wrote a post with the same title on the day that the current president was inaugurated. Sadly, many of the fears that I hoped were paranoia have been vindicated. We're currently awaiting an election a few months away that provides a sort of negative hope - not that things will suddenly become great, but that they'll become less terrible.
A deadly disease rampages through our country as a result of a politicized culture-war narrative that seeks to downplay the gravity of the situation. Health, and basic survival have become a binary political issue. Because we are for protecting our neighbors by wearing masks outside, the other side chooses to be against it. While the rest of the world appears to be recovering from this deadly pandemic, our country sees record-breaking new cases, and a national leadership that feels it is knowing that fact, not the fact itself, that is the greater threat to us.
Today is the 244th anniversary of our nation's Declaration of Independence. We are always in a cycle of reckoning with this country's history. In early June, a restless and pent-up energy saw the beginning of massive protests against the impunity with which our law enforcement agencies kill unarmed people of color. There has come a certain cultural understanding, it seems, that this problem is deep-rooted. After all, the very man who wrote "All men are created equal" participated in the "peculiar institution" of slavery. Some, nay most, of our founding fathers were hypocrites - that's just an undeniable fact. A nation born to the ideal of liberty that contained within it the legally recognized practice of chattel slavery.
Progress has certainly been made, though it has always been paid for with blood. Another Jefferson quote is that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Unfortunately, this quote is often embraced by fascistic death cultists who fail to see that they are, in fact, the tyrants.
I have a deep love, and a sort of painful faith in America. My grandparents on my father's side were Jewish Hungarians who still lived there during World War II. The Nazis took them, and both of them lost their first spouses. My grandfather lost his first son, who was then only a small child, I believe only 1 or 2, when the Nazis murdered him. While my grandparents were profoundly lucky to survive the Holocaust, the Communist regime that took over was another authoritarian police state.
After the failed revolution of 1956, my grandparents risked everything to get out of the country with my dad, and two years waiting in Austria, they came to America.
And when they got here, they lived the American dream, working hard and saving up so that my Dad could go to a good college and eventually wind up a respected college professor at a leading international institution.
This country allowed my dad's family to dig their way out of the most dreadful situation and emerge with prosperity, safety, and peace. When he was sent at gunpoint to freeze and die in Russia as part of a forced-labor battalion, I doubt my grandfather expected he'd die peacefully at age 90 in a warm bed in Massachusetts.
America is, on paper, a champion for many things I hold dearly. The notion that all people are equal under the law, that the government serves at the peoples' pleasure, and that there are rights that the government cannot take away from you.
What I have come to understand, however, is that in practice the country has always been at best a partial success. It has failed people of color, particularly black and indigenous people. The impunity with which the police commit violence against these groups in particular (though not exclusively limited to them) is the very sort of practice that characterized the tyranny that my grandparents came here to escape.
When I think about how I grew up - when the worst things the cops would do is call your parents if you got in trouble - it's remarkable the kind of mirror-reality that my black countrymen know.
For all our groundbreaking ideas of liberty and equality, I don't feel that America spent all that much time at any point in history actually leading in that category. There is a cult of greed and white supremacy that is at times overt and yet often subtle and insidious, and it has always held the country back from fulfilling its promise.
That, really, is what I believe in. I have faith in the promise of America. It's one we continually, heartbreakingly fail.
There is some hyper-optimistic hope that in our current era, when the cult is at its most overt, that we will finally be able to exorcise its influence on us. I'm skeptical it will be that easy, and I have my doubts that we're even en route to a successful confrontation at all.
It is hard to be overtly patriotic, though I've felt that way since the Bush administration turned hyper-patriotism into a jingoistic cultural signifier for warmongering (at least that's when I first felt the symbolism was tainted) and this holiday, which is a celebration of this messy, self-contradicting but also beautiful country's birth, comes with some asterisks.
For the last three years, of course, it has also taken on a personal note of grief. Three years ago yesterday, my mother died of cancer. While I still hold, somewhat obsessively, that the 3rd is my day to grieve, she died only half an hour before midnight, and so officially her date of death is the 4th. My mom, who was not an immigrant, and had ancestors going back to the Mayflower, had pride in America, but that pride meant that she could not tolerate those who abused it - those like Bush, or our current unmentionable abomination. By the time he came into office, my mom was in the last few months of her life, and I think was, rightfully, more concerned with her own existential questions and the way she wanted to spend the last time she had with her loved ones.
I think now about how many people in this country are in a similar state, but even worse, because while my Mom had about a year and a half to prepare, and her disease did not prevent her from being close to us, the people dying of Covid-19 are forced to do so in isolation. It's heartbreaking that we, this country that prides itself on being so great, the greatest country on Earth, as we seem to hold as a national creed, has failed so miserably to handle this crisis.
If I celebrate this holiday and this country, I do so as a yearning hope that we will, one day, live up to the standard we set for ourselves 244 years ago.
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