How do we celebrate America when our country has failed us?
Originally published in the Puppies & Politics newsletter—thus the seemingly non-sequitur inclusion of my dog. To subscribe, click here.
Tomorrow marks the Fourth of July. It’s going to be a strange one.
Even though many Americans have tried to wish it away, the coronavirus pandemic is still very much present in the United States — in fact, cases are on the rise. The administration’s magical thinking has proven not just misguided but dangerously incompetent. This response to the pandemic, combined with years of state-supported anti-intellectualism masquerading as rugged individualism (“you can’t tell me what to do, and what do those scientists know anyway?!”) have contributed to a surge of COVID-19 infections in red states. Since the start of the pandemic, there the US has seen nearly three million confirmed cases of the virus and suffered nearly 130,000 deaths.
Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter protests have now entered their second month, and while significant gains have been made as a result, the three police officers who killed Breonna Taylor in Louisville are still free, and a plan introduced by a a Louisville Metro Councilman to defund the Louisville Metro Police Department received only a single vote. In fact, far from being chastened by weeks of protests, it seems the police and their supporters feel empowered to act with even more impunity, tear-gassing musicians and mourners (some of them children) at a violin vigil for Elijah McClain in Aurora, Colorado and labeling the white couple who pointed guns at peaceful protesters in St. Louis as the “victims” in the incident.
This week, the news broke that Russia had probably put bounties on American troops stationed in Afghanistan…and that the president had this intel and did nothing about it. (If you want to get extra depressed about this situation, see how a “normal” administration would have handled it.) For a party that talks a big game about “supporting our troops,” the GOP sure has been loath to condemn the president’s response.
Everywhere you look, you see America failing.
America is failing to protect its citizens from disease. Failing to protect them from racism. Failing to protect them from an increasingly militarized police. Failing to protect the enlisted amongst them from a hostile nation that has tried every way it can to destabilize our government, our economy, our society.
And yet tomorrow, we’re supposed to celebrate it.
I listened this morning to a recording of Alan Ginsberg reading his poem, “America.”
“America,” he begins. “I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.” So have we all, and so are we all. It’s hard to feel any optimism, any love for America, when it has so profoundly and so publicly disappointed us.
And yet the state is not the country. The state is not its people. Later in the poem, Ginsberg writes, “It occurs to me that I am America.” So are we all, and so shall we be. We are, even now, effecting change. We are being responsible and respectful so that even when we take to the streets, we are careful not to expose our fellow citizens to potential infection. We are toppling statues and running for office and changing our very language. To paraphrase Gandhi, we can be the America we wish to see.
If it feels like there’s very little to celebrate tomorrow, that’s because there is. So instead, perhaps, we should celebrate (from a safe social distance, in small groups) what can be. We can celebrate the future Langston Hughes invoked in “Let America Be America Again” when he wrote:
O, let America be America again —
The land that never has been yet —
And yet must be — the land where every man is free.
To the freedoms we share, and the freedoms to come. We are, all of us, America.
