The Fourth has come and gone this year and everything feels different. I have never been one to wave the flag and I never burned money with fireworks. Oh, I love a good fireworks display, but I still think they’re kind of absurd. For individuals to go out and buy thousands of dollars worth of gunpowder and just set it off…I wish I had that kind of disposable income. I don’t put up a flag, wear a lapel pin, slap a sticker on my car, or fawn over patriotic blather. I don’t feel the need to demonstrate to anyone that I’m an American or justify my beliefs in performative posturing.
But I have in the past had little problem with others indulging themselves in all that.
Because there have always been good reasons to be grateful and proud. In spite of our shortcomings, we live in a country that has generally tried to be kind, compassionate, and generous. This year we can see just how much of those traits have been there because so much of our compassion and generosity has been shut off and the world has suffered. People have died because we turned out back on the world.
Not completely, not at the individual level, and a lot of people are finding work-arounds to take up the slack, but since January of 2025 America has withdrawn our long commitment to assistance and the consequences can be counted in corpses, many of them children.
So it is said that the usual camaraderie of years past was absent in many gatherings. Certain family members and friends were disinvited. Phone calls didn’t happen. Doors were left closed.
And feelings were bruised.
Sad, perhaps, but no one should be surprised. Especially not the people who supported this. That they are says more about them than they perhaps realize.
None of this was done secretly. They told us what they wanted to do. And many Americans thought that was great, or at a minimum that it wouldn’t really be that bad. There is too little moral wiggle room here. They voted to hurt people. All the justifications, all the them-too nonsense, all the specious number games, added up to papering over a fundamental desire to get rid of certain people.
Call it racism. It’s hard to deny it. The only foreigners whole-heartedly welcomed in the last year and a half were white South Africans, and for the most ridiculous of reasons. Basically, they aren’t allowed to be in charge of their country to the detriment of all the other people who live there and they are “oppressed.” Call it racism.
There are several other things added on for good measure.
If we need further evidence, the attempt to undo birthright citizenship ought to suffice.
I will never understand what goes on in someone’s head when they look at someone whose skin is darker and whose physiognomy is unlike theirs and there is that frisson of revulsion that never resolves into anything but more revulsion. I don’t get it. The white racist sees a black person and feels fear and rejection and the urge to eject. What is that? What is that nasty worm that defeats a rational reaction and the possibility of seeing an equal? It’s reflexive, automatic, thoughtless. Ugly in ways few other things are.
And unquestioned. Maybe that’s the part I don’t understand, that disturbs me. That they never question this foul reaction. Nothing seems to turn them from the hatred and fear that is attendant upon that reaction. Down in the hindbrain they see nothing kindred.
They have been worked on their whole lives by those who seek to reproduce themselves ideologically. Changing such a frame of reference can be hard work and maybe that’s the other part, the work, the resentment that how they react to others not like them is a disease that they need to cure. It’s hard work and they can’t see a reason why they should do it, except there are these people telling they have to, that that reaction is a bad thing.
We tried to establish institutional work-arounds so that the generally accepted dignity of diverse peoples can flourish even while there are those in the community who hate them. We tried to create buffers and alternatives and education and methods.
Much of it worked.
But then an opportunity arose for the recalcitrant and unapologetic to seize power and dismantle all those programs and recreate the conditions wherein they could openly disparage and dispose of those they cannot abide.
In so doing they have revealed themselves as unrepentant and unreconstructed racists, sexists, classists who expected the rest of us to cheer them on now that they have the chance to Get Rid Of All Those Inferior People. They expected the majority of us to support them.
Instead, they are no longer welcome at the usual get-togethers. And they don’t understand. They thought because we shared certain physical characteristics and maybe even voted in certain ways that we would become automatic allies.
They don’t seem to get it that hatred is not a family value. Not, really, a value at all. Just a deep dark hole in the soul that sucks the life out of everything and leaves nothing but ruin in its wake.
This is not a partisan issue. Not unless you believe that being terrified of boogy men and being willing to kill people to shield your eyes from your own inability to see past the manipulations and the desperate and groundless paranoia are matters of Republican versus Democrat. That the simple desire to lend assistance to people who don’t have enough is purely a consequence of political ideology.
Make no mistake, this is all an example of hatred. That man in the White House is nothing if not the Hater In Chief. Everything he has touched this past year has turned to ash. All because he hates. (You don’t know what’s in his head, how can you say that? Well, by his actions. He has ended programs, long established programs, that kept people alive. He has issued calumny against people he doesn’t know. He has sent his thugs to treat people like animals and in the process has killed many of them. And, just to demonstrate how petty he is, unlike every past president he refuses to hang the official portrait of two of his predecessors.) He would like to think that he is America, everything is about him, nothing can be good or wonderful or great unless he can take credit. I’m not celebrating that.
And after all that, there are still people who think he’s great. Many of them are no longer being invited to get-togethers and parties and celebrations. The baffling thing is, many of them genuinely don’t get it.
The Distal Muse
A Different Fourth
The Fourth has come and gone this year and everything feels different. I have never been one to wave the flag and I never burned money with fireworks. Oh, I love a good fireworks display, but I still think they’re kind of absurd. For individuals to go out and buy thousands of dollars worth of gunpowder and just set it off…I wish I had that kind of disposable income. I don’t put up a flag, wear a lapel pin, slap a sticker on my car, or fawn over patriotic blather. I don’t feel the need to demonstrate to anyone that I’m an American or justify my beliefs in performative posturing.
But I have in the past had little problem with others indulging themselves in all that.
Because there have always been good reasons to be grateful and proud. In spite of our shortcomings, we live in a country that has generally tried to be kind, compassionate, and generous. This year we can see just how much of those traits have been there because so much of our compassion and generosity has been shut off and the world has suffered. People have died because we turned out back on the world.
Not completely, not at the individual level, and a lot of people are finding work-arounds to take up the slack, but since January of 2025 America has withdrawn our long commitment to assistance and the consequences can be counted in corpses, many of them children.
So it is said that the usual camaraderie of years past was absent in many gatherings. Certain family members and friends were disinvited. Phone calls didn’t happen. Doors were left closed.
And feelings were bruised.
Sad, perhaps, but no one should be surprised. Especially not the people who supported this. That they are says more about them than they perhaps realize.
None of this was done secretly. They told us what they wanted to do. And many Americans thought that was great, or at a minimum that it wouldn’t really be that bad. There is too little moral wiggle room here. They voted to hurt people. All the justifications, all the them-too nonsense, all the specious number games, added up to papering over a fundamental desire to get rid of certain people.
Call it racism. It’s hard to deny it. The only foreigners whole-heartedly welcomed in the last year and a half were white South Africans, and for the most ridiculous of reasons. Basically, they aren’t allowed to be in charge of their country to the detriment of all the other people who live there and they are “oppressed.” Call it racism.
There are several other things added on for good measure.
If we need further evidence, the attempt to undo birthright citizenship ought to suffice.
I will never understand what goes on in someone’s head when they look at someone whose skin is darker and whose physiognomy is unlike theirs and there is that frisson of revulsion that never resolves into anything but more revulsion. I don’t get it. The white racist sees a black person and feels fear and rejection and the urge to eject. What is that? What is that nasty worm that defeats a rational reaction and the possibility of seeing an equal? It’s reflexive, automatic, thoughtless. Ugly in ways few other things are.
And unquestioned. Maybe that’s the part I don’t understand, that disturbs me. That they never question this foul reaction. Nothing seems to turn them from the hatred and fear that is attendant upon that reaction. Down in the hindbrain they see nothing kindred.
They have been worked on their whole lives by those who seek to reproduce themselves ideologically. Changing such a frame of reference can be hard work and maybe that’s the other part, the work, the resentment that how they react to others not like them is a disease that they need to cure. It’s hard work and they can’t see a reason why they should do it, except there are these people telling they have to, that that reaction is a bad thing.
We tried to establish institutional work-arounds so that the generally accepted dignity of diverse peoples can flourish even while there are those in the community who hate them. We tried to create buffers and alternatives and education and methods.
Much of it worked.
But then an opportunity arose for the recalcitrant and unapologetic to seize power and dismantle all those programs and recreate the conditions wherein they could openly disparage and dispose of those they cannot abide.
In so doing they have revealed themselves as unrepentant and unreconstructed racists, sexists, classists who expected the rest of us to cheer them on now that they have the chance to Get Rid Of All Those Inferior People. They expected the majority of us to support them.
Instead, they are no longer welcome at the usual get-togethers. And they don’t understand. They thought because we shared certain physical characteristics and maybe even voted in certain ways that we would become automatic allies.
They don’t seem to get it that hatred is not a family value. Not, really, a value at all. Just a deep dark hole in the soul that sucks the life out of everything and leaves nothing but ruin in its wake.
This is not a partisan issue. Not unless you believe that being terrified of boogy men and being willing to kill people to shield your eyes from your own inability to see past the manipulations and the desperate and groundless paranoia are matters of Republican versus Democrat. That the simple desire to lend assistance to people who don’t have enough is purely a consequence of political ideology.
Make no mistake, this is all an example of hatred. That man in the White House is nothing if not the Hater In Chief. Everything he has touched this past year has turned to ash. All because he hates. (You don’t know what’s in his head, how can you say that? Well, by his actions. He has ended programs, long established programs, that kept people alive. He has issued calumny against people he doesn’t know. He has sent his thugs to treat people like animals and in the process has killed many of them. And, just to demonstrate how petty he is, unlike every past president he refuses to hang the official portrait of two of his predecessors.) He would like to think that he is America, everything is about him, nothing can be good or wonderful or great unless he can take credit. I’m not celebrating that.
And after all that, there are still people who think he’s great. Many of them are no longer being invited to get-togethers and parties and celebrations. The baffling thing is, many of them genuinely don’t get it.
I for one am tired of trying to explain it.
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