The Good Fight

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE WILL HAVE NEW MEANING THIS JULY 4.

We will celebrate our independence as a nation while we declare our independence from reality. We will attend backyard barbecues as we codify our independence from compassion and rationalize our retreat from common sense. We will light up the sky with fireworks as we extinguish our beacon as leaders of the free world.

We will do it gladly, madly. We will make ourselves blind and claim it’s everyone else who can’t see. We will revise the past, erasing the parts we don’t like – as if history was written in erasable ink and not in sweat, tears, and blood.

We will applaud and cheer. We will buy hats and t-shirts. We will take selfies with the gestapo and spread the government’s propaganda. We will honor traitors with statues and ships, and punish anyone who dares hold those in power accountable.

Get with the program or get out. Keep your mouth shut or rot in a cage.

This may not be you – this isn’t your America, you say. the one you grew up loving despite its flaws (or because of them.) But’s it’s what we are now, it’s what the world will see and think of us, and it’s a history we will have to accept at least in the short term.

Outrage won’t change things. This post won’t change anything either, nor will your memes or rants or repetition of facts or calling out hypocrisy.

Instead, perhaps it’s time for the good to declare their independence from ignorance and fealty. Perhaps the good need to declare independence from parties who only care about preservation, and pledge allegiance to each other and the promise that this 249-year-old experiment still has merit.

Good people created this nation. Good people now need to save it. And if 1776 showed us anything, it’s that anything can happen when the good fight.