To secure these rights…
Today's post isn't really about sex. But this makes up for it, no?
I was born in the United States, and that’s where I live. Today is Independence Day here. It commemorates not any victory or truce, but simply the intention to stop being a trodden-upon colony. This is kind of like celebrating your anniversary with a paramour on the day you first admitted you wanted to fuck each other rather than the day you actually did for the first time. Which is fine, really, just an interesting choice that becomes completely meaningless unless there’s some decisive follow-through. Which, in the case of the Declaration of Independence, there was. It was called the Revolutionary War.
I’m somewhat conflicted as a U.S. citizen. It always feels awkward that there’s not a proper word for us. “American” is desperately broad and kind of pushy, as if the manifest destiny myth gives us the right to claim ourselves the sole possessors of all flavors and varieties of Americas, some of which are entire continents. Sure, “America” in this case is just shorthand for “United States of America”, and no one else seems to need it as much as we do (try saying United Statesian. It just doesn’t work), but it bothers me anyway. Other things bother me more profoundly. Our country was never, even once, all integrity and liberty and pie. The United States government and its citizens systematically slaughtered and displaced the people of sovereign native nations to get us where we are today. They enslaved and exploited those people and so many others for generations. No ends justify those means.
I don’t believe our founding fathers were infallible or indefatigably noble. I don’t think that they necessarily planned for “all men are created equal” to mean seriously fucking everyone someday. They were, as we are, products of their era and culture, and that means they had some pretty shitty ideas about plenty of subjects. Instead of perfect intentions and godlike wisdom (or even the moral high ground), though, they gave us wonderful promises and forged them into law. That’s their beautiful legacy.
What I love about my home are the promises it was built on. Those flawed men gave us the framework to grow into an honest, fair, and free society, or as close as we’re likely to ever get. I intensely believe this, and it makes me grateful and yes, proud.
But just because those promises were made doesn’t mean they’re automatically kept. I don’t just think, I observe that we’re not as free as we think we are in this country. Votes become increasingly difficult to verify as paper ballots are phased out. Appointing corporate lobbyists to White House cabinet and advisory positions has become de rigueur. People are lining up to hand in their reproductive rights, relinquish free speech (funny how limiting someone else’s rights also compromises your own), and to thwart the one provision in the Constitution that seems designed to give us a fighting chance if everything goes irretrievably to hell. We’re losing cherished friends, family, and compatriots in two interminable wars that most of us don’t seem to believe in. Our president, who was stridently opposed to the Patriot Act while he was campaigning, recently extended it by a year, and was met with precious little outrage.
The government can do bad things. It will sometimes try to do them in secret. There are recorded, admitted instances where this has happened in the past. So I have to ask, has any government in history ever cleaned up its act and restored its integrity on its own, without a coup, a war, or at least the undeviating insistence of an incensed public? What makes us think a government that, for example, covertly performed mind-control experiments on many of its citizens without their informed consent mere decades ago can be trusted today?
And yet, apathy thrives. Helplessness encroaches.
I realize that everyone has a different vision of the ideal America (mine has a lot of naked frolicking). I don’t know the answers to everything, and I’m not pretending to. I just feel very strongly that no good can come from a nation’s citizens having fewer rights and sitting idly by while more important promises are broken. Even if you’re not using all your rights or you don’t particularly like some of them, aren’t they… I dunno… kind of nice to have? Just in case?
My fellow United Statesians, have a great Independence Day. See fireworks. Grill meat (or tofu, if you’re kinky like that) over fire. Celebrate your state’s relaxed sodomy laws. Do something outdoors. Our nation is beautiful and you have every right to love it. But today I feel bound to remind myself that freedom isn’t something you’re necessarily born with and get to keep. That’s the way it should be, in a perfect world, but in reality freedom can be taken away at any time. That’s when you have to decide whether or not you’re going to declare your intentions to fight for it. And then, fucking follow through.
