This July 4th, 2025, I Grieve for the Great Experiment in Governance Now Gone; for the Dreams Now Deferred, for Lifetimes.
And I hold this truth to be self-evident: In the era of Fox News, Breitbart, and other drivers of the disinformation machine, Voters Are Not Created Equal.
My country, ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of Liberty,
Re-e-quiem.
Land where my father died,
Our freedoms were his pride,
Healthcare for all, his goal now denied,
By despotic nihilism.
This July 4th, 2025,
The truths we wanted to hold self-evident, we cannot any longer. All men (sic) are not created equal in these dis-United States of America. Only some are deemed to be endowed with such inalienable rights as Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: the richest and whitest among us, whose privilege has blinded them to their own wanton acts of inane nihilism.
This July 4th, 2025,
I grieve for the loss of my birthplace. While still far from realizing the greatest of our ideals, the goals worth striving for — the dream of equality for all, the promise of governance by the people for the people, the commitment to human rights, and rule by constitutional law — appear to be set back, potentially, for lifetimes.
This July 4th, 2025,
All that I was brought up to believe in and to value may have been signed away by a clownish conman and madman, yes. But they’ve been taken out, as well, by my citizen fellows. Folks duped by their own self-importance, or by a host of pretend grievances stoked by Fox News, Breitbart, and other propaganda machines peddling in disinformation, to vote against their best interests.
They voted for representatives willing to cut taxes for already morbidly rich individuals and corporations.
They voted to slash Medicaid and undermine food security programs for the most vulnerable among us, which might include them.
They voted to illegally withhold billions of dollars earmarked for the education of their children and our next generation — monies appropriated by last year’s Congress and due to be dispersed right now.
This July 4th, 2025,
As our elected “leaders” attack our public welfare, they take us back to the days of the Robber Barons, when corporations enjoyed extraordinary profits, while unemployment soared, productivity plummeted, wages cratered, children did the work of men in fields and factories, farmers lost lands to bank foreclosures, elderly and disabled people feasted only on others’ discarded scraps, business owners treated their laborers with impunity as banks, unregulated, gambled away the hard-earned money of your great-grandparents, and mine.
We know from history that trickle-down economics and lack of regulation do not work. And yet, here we are. Teed up for another Great Depression once again.
This July 4th, 2025,
Our elected “leaders,” like snakes eating their own tails, have bequeathed a warchest of $170.7 billion to the most troubled, least transparent law enforcement agencies in the land to turn the dis-USA into a police state through amped up and heinously cruel immigration enforcement, as if we haven’t experienced enough of their violence and impunity already. While the health of our people and the education of future generations have been bargained away, paramilitary forces under the aegis of the Department of Homeland “Security” will now receive:
$51.6 billion for more boondoggle border wall construction. FYI, walls don’t stop organized crime. They create and embolden it.
$45 billion for ICE to imprison more non-offenders, a 265% increase from its already bloated FY 2024 budget.
$29.9 billion for more terrorizing Gestapo-like raids and disappearances, a threefold increase, according to the American Immigration Council, making ICE bigger than the FBI, the US Bureau of Prisons, the DEA, and other federal paramilitaries, combined.
This July 4th, 2025,
One radical document, the Declaration of Independence, has been replaced by another: the MAGA Mega Murder Bill. And with the stroke of a Sharpie, the USA becomes a civilization fallen, and in less than 250 years.
This July 4th, 2025,
The nihilism of a conman and his cabal of malign sycophants return us to the police state from which we were born. Some say decades of history will be rolled back today. To me, it looks more like centuries. History is repeating itself in the so-called Land of the Free. And as I wrote in my last post, the decades-long buildup to this tragic outcome was easily foretold:
This July 4th, 2025, will live on in infamy:
The day US voters and their elected officials swapped yesteryear’s prison labor camps — aka plantations, policed by Slave Patrols — for profit-making concentration camps to detain hard-working newcomers who’ve largely committed no crime, policed by people who look much like them.
The day the corrupt Robert’s court removed our right to due process under the law and allowed for our expulsion to shores unsafe and unknown for pretended and unproven offences — the very things the Declaration of Independence promised to protect.
What was once a system of enslavement of the many for the profit of a few is once again a system of enslavement of the many for the profit of the few. And when the rights of some are taken away today, so go our rights tomorrow.
My fellow Americans…
What is taking place in the dis-USA this July 4th, 2025, upholds my observation, expressed in Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, that the real crisis facing our world today is not the number of people on the move and crossing borders.
The real crisis facing us today is the hardening of the human heart.
There is only suffering on the horizon. When that suffering crosses your threshold please remember that this is what you voted for, if you cast your vote for Trump & Co: $450 million a year not to keep a roof over your head in old age, not to educate the future leaders of our nation, not to ensure future elections are free and fair, but to enslave 5,000 undocumented neighbors, family, colleagues, and friends, in cages under a tent in a swamp battered by the rising temperatures caused by climate breakdown and given the name “Alligator Alcatraz” by a leadership without empathy, who have the gall to call themselves “Christians.” And this is only one of the 200+ for-profit concentration camps your once healthcare subsidy and your children’s future education just funded.
“If we are losing our national identity, it is not because we are becoming blacker or browner or speak in more languages than we once did. It is because we are losing the ties that bind us together, our collective empathy,” writes
, in his Substack post of July 1, 2025.
He’s right. Empathy is a necessary precondition for a healthy society. A society without empathy can never be great. Not now. Not again.
This July 4th, 2025,
I grieve: for the great experiment in governance, now gone; for the dreams now deferred, for lifetimes to come.
I see it as you do.
No longer, Independence Day; it’s Enslavement Day.