Nothing to Celebrate

On July 4, 1776, a group of insurgents from the American colonies gathered to write a manifesto declaring their independence from the British king. They listed their grievances, among them denying representation to the people of the colonies and dissolving their existing legislative bodies, pressuring and disobeying judges, sending standing armies to occupy their cities and towns, cutting off trade with other countries, and sending mercenary armies “to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny.” The signers of the Declaration of Independence risked a great deal, as many of the rebels had already been arrested and transported to overseas prisons, their property confiscated. But they envisioned a government dedicated to the principles of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and were willing to go to war to attain it.

The American Revolution didn’t end until British forces surrendered at Yorktown in 1781, and it took eight years and two tries to write a workable Constitution, a ground-breaking document at that time. Realizing that the Constitution lacked full protections, its authors created a Bill of Rights that addressed their myriad grievances against the country’s former rulers, banning, for instance, the mandatory quartering of soldiers in private homes, searches and seizures without cause, and conviction for crimes without due process. The first amendment stood out, and still does:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Constitution, unique as it was at the time, still accommodated chattel slavery and failed to stop the genocide of Native Americans and seizure of their lands. It also failed to prevent a civil war that concluded with the abolition of slavery and guarantees of citizenship rights and voting rights to Black Americans. Over the years, women were granted the right to vote, and the age was lowered from 21 to 18. But throughout this 249-year history, lofty principles did not always translate into reality for people who continued to live under repressive conditions, with their rights regularly violated and their lives and opportunities constrained. Growing up in the South at the tail end of Jim Crow, I saw so many talented Black people stuck in menial jobs because of laws keeping them from educational opportunities and entrance into professions and acts of terror by white people against Black individuals and communities that appeared to be doing better than the white people were.

From the end of the Second World War, when the U.S. helped to defeat the Nazis, to the present day, civil rights activists have sought “a more perfect union,” one that offers the same liberties and opportunities to Black people, women, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities, among others. In fact, I have contributed an essay on the disability rights movement to a forthcoming book for middle grade readers, edited by Cheryl and Wade Hudson titled Toward a More Perfect Union.

However, this is the first July 4 in my lifetime when I feel there may be nothing to celebrate, that the ideals we’ve struggled for from 1776 through the post-WWII period to the present are retreating out of reach for us, our children, and our grandchildren. The people of the country elected — narrowly — a man who promised to rule as a dictator. Some of the people who voted for him didn’t believe him, because he didn’t turn into a dictator after losing the 2020 election — though he certainly tried with his supporters’ attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. One of my fellow LEGO builders told me he believed Trump would only be a dictator for “one day” in order to remove undocumented immigrants who had committed violent crimes, and then he would become an ordinary Republican president. Now honest hard-working immigrants who followed the rules and were granted temporary asylum are being plucked off the street and sent to prisons “overseas” and to domestic concentration camps like “Alligator Alcatraz.” Immigrants with green cards who have expressed opinions the rulers don’t like, such as Mahmoud Khalil (who was recently released after three months of legal wrangling and is still facing danger) are also disappearing into an unaccountable detention system. And now, the president is threatening to revoke the citizenship of naturalized citizens whose opinion he doesn’t like, with targets ranging from his former moneybags supporter Elon Musk to the winner of New York City’s Democratic Party mayoral primary Zohran Mamdani. If the president takes away Mamdani’s citizenship, rounds him up, and deports him as he’s threatened to do — and in doing so, negates the will of the Democratic Party voters who chose him as their candidate by a 12-point margin after the ranked choice votes were counted — it would be a sign that democracy is, indeed, dead in the United States. The removal of local candidates that displease the leader is a common event in both Russia and Türkiye, grim autocracies where prisons are chock full of dissidents. The fact that Trump has openly allied himself with Putin and frequently calls him for advice and the trading of favors is not a good sign, either for the fate of Putin’s beleaguered target Ukraine (until January 20, 2025 a U.S. ally) or for democracy in the United States. Joining forces with, and following in the footsteps of, an overseas tyrant is the opposite of what the authors of the Declaration of Independence intended.

There’s a tendency for revolutions of liberation to become institutionalized, part of a nation’s mythology, with anniversaries becoming mainly a party rather than an assessment of how far we’ve come and how far we still need to go. I saw this in Portugal, which last year celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution that ended 48 years of dictatorship. If people in Portugal are forgetting (or even romanticizing, as in the case of the neofascist party Chega) what it was like to live under the brutal and constraining rule of the Salazar/Caetano regime, it’s even more of an issue in the United States, where the revolution against the “mad king” George III took pace 249 years ago. Most people in this country don’t know what it’s like to live under a despotic regime, and many of the ones who do are people who came as refugees to the U.S. seeking freedom and are now being rounded up and sent to camps or deported.

I feel like this essay is becoming my own list of grievances. To the ones I’ve already mentioned, I add the rollback of civil rights protections that prevented discrimination against people on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity, and disability. In fact, the new regime has weaponized civil rights laws on behalf of white, straight men who now have the right to sue government agencies, educational institutions, and private businesses for discrimination if any Black person, woman, or person who is LGBTQ or disabled, however qualified, gets in ahead of them. I already know of several women who have been demoted from corporate positions or passed up for promotions as a result. They will be doing the same job — because the company needs their quality work — but they cannot occupy a top echelon or earn more than a man. The president’s dismissal of high ranking Black and female military officers and their replacement with white men is another example of what is happening, and one that will likely affect military readiness and recruitment. Given that the military has currently been sent to occupy parts of Los Angeles in defiance of established Posse Comitatus laws, I can’t say it’s necessarily a bad thing for the military to be unprepared and short-handed. But the overall effects of a military that doesn’t look like the people of the country, has shaky loyalty to the principles of the Constitution, and fears, detests, or simply doesn’t care about people who don’t look like them is likely to be even more brutality and abuse.

The authors of the Declaration of Independence 249 years ago took huge risks to air their grievances against the king. I feel like doing so today means also taking risks, and I celebrate everyone who has done so to mobilize the people of the country against our modern-day tyranny. Many of the essays I read come from people like Paul Krugman and Jennifer Rubin, who are now writing columns on Substack. Krugman, a former columnist for The New York Times, left to explore new formats for his essays (including length and frequency) that didn’t fit within the structure of his employer. Rubin’s words displeased the owner of the WaPo, who has become an open supporter of the regime; among the other people leaving the newspaper is Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Anna Telnaes, producer of a hard-hitting cartoon that the newspaper’s owner killed. I’ve also appreciated Heather Cox Richardson, who examines our present day situation in light of a history the regime is trying to erase, and the contributors of The Bulwark, rooted in the Cold War-era vision of the country as a beacon of democracy for those peoples trapped behind the Iron Curtain. I suggest you check out these sites on Substack and subscribe if you can, because no one writing there has a regular gig from a supine corporate media. Other places to read and donate if you can are independent, established sources for journalism, such as PBS/NPR and the Associated Press. I hope these vestiges of the free press can continue, and our support makes it more likely a) that they can sustain themselves and b) that the costs to the government of shutting them down by force will be too great for them to try.