Guess We’re Still Doing ‘Independence Day’

The irony burns.

The United States is 250 years old on Saturday, and Donald Trump is in the White House. Alas, this is not an implausible scenario, considering our nation’s history. Democracy means that American voters are free to make terrible choices

Adopting the Declaration of Independence on July 4 did not immediately free the American colonists from British rule. The Revolutionary War officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris, with terms "exceedingly generous" to the former colonies, on September 3, 1783. That’s still grilling season but it’s a little too close to Labor Day. It’s very American to celebrate the day independence was simply declared with fancy, hypocritical words than when it was actually won.

If just saying you’re free made you free in more than the existential sense, then I'd personally celebrate the day in September 1848 when Frederick Douglass published an open letter in his newspaper, The North Star, reading for filth the enslaver who’d previously held him in bondage. It’s far more personal than Thomas Jefferson’s beef with the British.

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I have selected this day on which to address you, because it is the anniversary of my emancipation; and knowing no better way, I am led to this as the best mode of celebrating that truly important events. Just ten years ago this beautiful September morning, yon bright sun beheld me a slave—a poor degraded chattel—trembling at the sound of your voice, lamenting that I was a man, and wishing myself a brute. The hopes which I had treasured up for weeks of a safe and successful escape from your grasp, were powerfully confronted at this last hour by dark clouds of doubt and fear, making my person shake and my bosom to heave with the heavy contest between hope and fear. I have no words to describe to you the deep agony of soul which I experienced on that never-to-be-forgotten morning—for I left by daylight. I was making a leap in the dark. The probabilities, so far as I could by reason determine them, were stoutly against the undertaking. The preliminaries and precautions I had adopted previously, all worked badly. I was like one going to war without weapons—ten chances of defeat to one of victory. One in whom I had confided, and one who had promised me assistance, appalled by fear at the trial hour, deserted me, thus leaving the responsibility of success or failure solely with myself. You, sir, can never know my feelings. As I look back to them, I can scarcely realize that I have passed through a scene so trying.

Four years later, Douglass dismissed the Fourth of July holiday with justified bitterness at an event commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence: “This Fourth of July is yours , not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn ... Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today.” Ye Olde Fox News probably attacked Douglass as a spoiled elitist who wasn't suitably grateful to America, which had given him the opportunity to escape slavery and become famous.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Black Americans have for generations celebrated our own, actual Independence Day — June 19, 1865, when the last enslaved people were “freed.” Juneteenth is finally a federal holiday, so maybe I should let everyone else celebrate even this Fourth of July in peace. But the Revolutionary War lasted only seven years and the British mostly left America alone, with a few notable exceptions such as the War of 1812 and the 1960s British Invasion. Black people’s war for our freedom will never end so long as we live and breathe in America.

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So far, this year, American citizens have been shot dead in the street, and their killers remain free, protected by the very government that House Speaker Mike Johnson unironically considers a MAGA protection racket. The Supreme Court is an unaccountable tool of fascism. The Supergirl movie bombed.

However, I still intend to continue my holiday tradition of watching the HBO adaptation of my favorite play, Angels in America. Prior Walter has AIDS but he vows to continue living, savoring all the world’s joys, both simple and wondrous. If America is afflicted by a terminal hatred and ignorance, then I shall remain as defiant as Prior.

This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.