This Fourth of July I cannot bring myself to even a modicum of pride. Everything about this day has just been left miserable, like a rotten taste of eating crab cakes that had been left out the fridge for days and then reheated and swallowed. And it's not because of just the Conservatives having usurped the flag to make Patriotism some sort of litmus test to see who can hate the gays the most, and it's not just because the Liberals and their "wokeness" make me want to paint Thomas Jefferson as a demonic murderer, but mostly it's because no one seems to be able to look at the birth of this country with a discerning eye.
History is complicated. Because history is made of people, and people are complicated, and many complicated people doing many complicated things makes history something that lays itself wide open to vast interpretation, especially when the quality of the human mind wants to distill everything down to the length of a tweet or a pithy phrase that fits nicely on a bumper sticker.
It is the facility of thought and the shallowness of thinking of my fellow Americans that has made me unable to be proud of this country on this day. 245 years old and this is what we have produced: a bunch of screaming harpies who cogitate like toddlers fighting over the ice cream that has spilled on the floor?
We are a sad sad lot, if we are this incapable of seeing ourselves and our past in anything other than, "They were HEROES!" or "They were GENOCIDAL SLAVE OWNERS!"
Because they were both. At the same time.
And they were also so much more than that.
And just because each person has dug themselves into their own little ideological playpen does not negate the fact that the people who started this country were so much more than anything we can imagine, because we are so stagnant in our "good/bad" mode of thought.
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