Monday, July 4, 2022

July 4th Thoughts

I'm not much feeling like celebrating Independence Day this year.  No matter how instrumental America was in saving the world from the alien invasion -- that is what we're celebrating, right? -- it's just kind of hard to celebrate with our constitutional rights being stripped away in favor kleptocracy and gerontocracy and fascism. We won our independence from England for this? 

Land of the Free? Not if you're planning to get an abortion, or any sort of gender-affirming care. Want to fly across state lines? "Papers, please, Citizen." Certainly not if you plan to make money through any sort of sex work. You're free to vote, of course, but if you seem likely to vote for the wrong party then it's going to be as difficult as the GOP can manage -- and if the Supreme Court continues along their current path, they'll put the fix in on that, too. 

Home of the Brave? Ye gods, I hope that's still so. I hope we can still rise up and push back against all this. Yes, a lot of damage has been done already, and barring an extreme change it will take years to recover from it. But people in other places have taken extreme measures and produced results that seem unimaginable in present-day America. It can be done; can we do it?

Anyway... things are looking pretty bleak to me right now, and I really don't feel like celebrating -- not until I have something worth being patriotic over. 

Amusingly, it's an Englishman who's got the best anthem I've heard for this so far:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Feel free to leave comments; it lets me know that people are actually reading my blog. Interesting tangents and topic drift just add flavor. Linking to your own stuff is fine, as long as it's at least loosely relevant. Be civil, and have fun!