Is Independence Day the most reactionary seppo holiday? Discuss. Also complain about flag displays, parades, fireworks, etc.
The hell-like heat dome currently covering eastern america and heart of the reich/Washington DC really is apt.
Lowest energy 4th of July I’ve ever seen. The only person I know that’s excited is so stupid he thinks the US hasn’t lost any wars, everyone else is too depressed too broke or both to even fake giving a shit.
I’m in boomerville and I’m sorry to say that the boomers are not okay, folks. Lots of boomers and boomer-adjacent people wearing flags and saying “happy fourth.” Many of my neighbors are millionaires and billionaires and some decided to set off some fireworks at ten last night. I woke up, hoping and praying that Xi had finally done it, only to find sadly that my atoms had not joined the nuclear chain reaction 😔
It is 9:00 a.m. and there is already someone out there setting fireworks off.
redacted Brace noise redacted
E) it’s now 4 am the day after and there’s still someone out there shooting fireworks off.
I feel like my relationship to the holiday changes with each passing year. For most of my life I wasn’t giving it much thought: “there was a king……… he was a bad guy……… so we (who is “we”?) got rid of 'im.” — reactionary in celebrating Seppoland, but at least celebrating a monarchist constitution and then an anti-monarchist declaration of independence within two months of each other helped me become a republican faster.
For the past few years on the other hand, I’ve been thinking: the only reason I celebrate the Fourth of July is because I’m an American born in diaspora. So doesn’t the day really commemorate, for me, all the effort my mom went through to leave Seppoland and build a new life and new family in a new country, and all the flag-waving stuff about “constitutions” and “declarations of independence” is just reactionary set dressing we can forget about? Isn’t having family across the pond something much more worth commemorating than some evil empire?
But even with that change of framing, each passing Fourth of July grows lower and lower in energy, because regardless of what I call it, I’m ultimately still just rebranding Genocide, Slavery, Imperialism and Pedophilia Day, and for most of the people celebrating the day, that’s what it remains, a reactionary holiday. If I’m calling the Fourth of July a celebration of my own family and immigrant background, then that celebration still exists in the broader Context™ of Donald Trump making a big deal out of “250” as his regime continues to kill, maim and kidnap countless people; and Native nations trying to seize the opportunity to educate the willfully ignorant about their history and plight. Every year makes the Fourth of July seem more and more unsalvageable as a date for celebrating anything.
On the plus side, every birthday commemorates getting a year closer to death, and 250 is like 82 in empire years.
I’m gonna say something that’s been on my mind
A nation that you can go to from anywhere else in the world because you were being oppressed and be part of a project that fights against it is so fucking cool. The promise on the Statue of Liberty is so fucking sick.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
China’s the force of good in the world and they’re not even trying to be this. Disgusting fucking Reagan, goes on to say this in his farewell address,
"You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.‘’
And it fills me with a sense of wonder. For example, of course, that country that’s promised by these sentiments is exactly the escape people need FROM AMERICA RIGHT NOW. The trillion dollar army and all the upheaval it causes creates huddled masses and is louder than anyone with its storied pomp. But as I contemplated Trump trying to overturn birthright citizenship I have this yearning for that place: a nation of immigrants who come together to show off how stupid blood and soil is and how all their national projects crumble beneath the might of a civic union who will never forget what it’s like to be subject to exploitation, extraction, and violence. All for what? Skin color and skull shape? And instead of this ideal, Trump wanted to sign a piece of paper that said “actually no, we’re trying to be like a 1950s magazine advertisement and our 250 year old blood is the best blood, folks. Really, it goes great with the soil. We have soil like you wouldn’t believe.”
That United States would be a beautiful place worth sticking around for. It would be kind of
sadbittersweet (?) if that was washed away to be an outcrop of China. And it’s such a weird feeling because of all the millions killed, a magnitude more suffering unnecessarily, all the destabilization, environmental destruction, nuclear brinksmanship, and the disgusting behavior on top of it. What, you just leave America to it to reconstitute itself into a good place ™? But what about that place where your origin story is nothing more than a fun fact?
