On Independence- The Fourth of July in the Trump Era.

Culture, Millennial Op-Ed, Politics and Current Events 3 Minutes

Today is the Fourth of July, our second in the Trump era, and it’s worth taking a look at what that means.

The Fourth is the day we celebrate both our first Continental Congress’s unanimous approval of the resolution for independence from Great Britain and their approval of the Declaration of Independence two days later on July 4, 1776.

In the beginning, reasonable people sat in Philadelphia and declared their unwillingness to be subject to an authoritarian rule, due in no small part to the conduct of their mentally fragile and dangerously unfit ruler, Mad King George the Third.
Since then, Independence Day has become not just a date but an idea.

The architects who built our nation put lifetimes worth of effort, planning, and design into the framework we all now live within, and it’s a good thing they did.

In the age of the would-be dictator presently occupying the White House, we find the United States Constitution, the blueprint provided to us by our founders for the maintenance of that system, under assault at every turn.

It’s not all barbecues and fireworks out there today. There’s a lot of people who aren’t feeling independent at all, and there are others who’ve been stripped of their independence by a United States government that has grown cold and callous and stupid under the reign of Donald Trump.

It’s worse than we thought it would be, or at least just as bad. Charlottesville and the death of Heather Heyer hadn’t happened yet by this time last year, the Supreme Court hadn’t allowed itself to be corrupted by enforcing Trump’s stupid travel ban, and above all, there were not thousands of children locked in cages on our southern border.

That last has thrown our country into turmoil without precedent. We get some reminder every day. Earlier today, for example, a woman in New York City was arrested for attempting to scale the Statue of Liberty on a free-climb.durning the anti-ICE protests.

Do not ever underestimate the lengths to which people will go for freedom. Whether it’s our own or someone else, it doesn’t matter. Freedom is freedom. That means either everybody has it, or that no one really does.

The Trump era is not going to be the end of us. It’s going to be the end of the Republicans. This is a dying gasp from the forces of reaction. It’s a small bump in the road we have to surmount, on our way to doing away with Republicans and right-wing conspiracies that defy good sense and reason.
The Republicans have swallowed poison bait and are dead already. They just don’t know it yet. This is the last thing they are ever going to see.
Going forward, we’ve just got to make people understand. As long as we see to it with hard work and endurance, we’re going to win. We’re right there. We’ve just got to hold it together.
Right now, civil unrest has swept the country, but recent reports of a second Civil War beginning thankfully proved to be false, like every other word ever spoken by Alex Jones. All is far from lost. 
It’s only if we give up and go back to sleep that we’re going to lose. If that happens we’ll never get back up again, but it isn’t forced. We’ve got to keep ourselves together and wait for our chance to counterattack and have faith that it will come.
If the suffragists and civil rights martyrs would have given up so fast, we never would have had a free country to fight for in the first place. They were dealing with much worse conditions than we are, even in these dark days.
Last year, I wrote that by this time next year, we’d be digging new trenches again, as we embark on the struggle to retake the Congress and go about the business of setting things back to right. That is indeed what we are doing now, and the stakes could not be higher. Independence will live on, but only if we insist.

Published by themillennialdemocrats

Political analyst, historian, Democratic organizer

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