I grew up with Fourth of July celebrations, though the ones I remember were not particularly patriotic – I don’t recall any speeches, much less any on the topic of loving one’s country – but rather an excuse for a community gathering.
In Friendswood, the then tiny town outside of Houston where I grew up, there was a parade every 4th followed by a barbecue and small rodeo in the community park. My sister and I rode horses in the parade most years, sometimes accompanied by our parents (depended on the number of horses we had available at the time).
I recall participating in the rodeo a few times, doing barrel racing and pole-bending on my horse Sue, who was quite good at those things, having been trained as a cutting horse. However, we never practiced enough, plus Sue was part Mustang, which gave her short legs. We never won anything.
In high school I remember marching with my high school band in a nearby town for the parade and even playing in a half-assed band for that town’s rodeo.
Much later on, when I lived in Washington, DC, I went down to the Capitol grounds for the symphony concert and watched the excellent fireworks display on the mall from there. No speeches at that event, either. I recall singing “This Land Is Your Land,” though. Reagan was president and most of the people at the concert were not big fans.
So my thoughts on the 4th of July have more to do with horses and parades and barbecue and music than they do with patriotism. Which is a good thing, because this 4th I am fresh out of patriotism. The regime in charge of our government is busy undermining almost everything I hold dear about the United States of America and bringing back all the worst aspects of our country.
I was looking up quotes about patriotism and came across this one from H.L. Mencken:
The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.
I don’t always agree with Mencken, who is usually far too cynical for me, but that comment resonates. I’d really like for the United States to become the exceptional place they taught us about in school.
The recent Supreme Court decision that has the potential for undermining birthright citizenship – it didn’t do that directly, but it allowed the grifter in the White House to push forward his supposed “executive order” that completely contradicts the 14th Amendment – is another reason to be aghast at what is going on in the country right now.
Despite being not just a natural born citizen but one whose U.S. ancestry goes back to before there was a country, I have always thought birthright citizenship was one of the things that made our country great. I was appalled to learn that it didn’t exist in other countries.
The current efforts to throw people out of the country make me extremely angry, especially when so many of them are people we should be welcoming with open arms. The fact that it’s being done by groups of thugs who hide their faces and don’t wear uniforms or badges makes this feel like the kind of hells we were taught about in school.
(And yes I know our history is replete with episodes of that kind of violence, from the Ku Klux Klan to the wars on the indigenous population, but there was a time when I thought we were moving forward from that, becoming something close to the democratic ideal we were supposed to be. The extremists in charge at the moment seem hell-bent on destroying any possibility of that.)
So I’m inclined to be in mourning for my country this 4th of July, and plan to wear black – including my “Mundus Sine Caesaribus” t-shirt – rather than red, white, and blue.
But I did come across – thanks to friends in my political emotional support group – this piece by Judge Michael Luttig that reinterprets the Declaration of Independence for the present.
Judge Luttig is far more conservative than I am. I often shook my head over his rulings as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. But he is a man of integrity and one with a deep understanding of the law.
And these days, at least, we’re on the same side when it comes to the difference between a country ruled by an arbitrary king and one subject to the rule of law.
Mundus Sine Caesaribus indeed.