America the Beautiful
Today feels differently than other days. There should be fireworks, barbecues, kids running with no destination, and people celebrating our freedom. In Los Angeles, our restaurants and stores remain largely closed. Our streets are empty. Walking around my neighborhood, I saw a gathering of 15 people, old and young, eating potato salad in fold-up chairs. Men drank bud light while women drank white wine. One person manned the grill and served hamburgers. There were no masks and no distancing. While this sight left me with a feeling of disgust, it’s how many Americans feel: We’re just dealing with the Flu, it’s a liberal hoax, or it’s not that serious…Normally, the whole block would be celebrating with family in typical white suburban fashion. On July 4th, 2020, America’s 244th anniversary, things feel different. People have often asked me what my problems with the greatest country in the world could possibly be. “Are you a patriot or a communist?”, they ask.
Even if you glamorize your Tinder photos and include only the best edits and takes, you neglect to mention your history of co-dependency, emotional abuse, and insecurities. Despite your attempt to embellish your poor dating history, America’s history is far uglier. We recruited despicable Nazi scientists post World War II and the CIA led coups in most Central and South American countries, overruling their democratically led elections. Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico, heavily populated minority areas do not have adequate representation. America does not feel beautiful to me. Our nation’s leadership fascinates me, and its lack of critical thinking and education frustrates me, but it is not something to be adored.
America’s violent police force murder minorities with impunity. It’s taken 56 years after the Civil Rights Act for the majority of the nation to understand that we vastly need police reform. It took the brutal torture of George Floyd. Floyd’s murderer placed his knee on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. His fellow police stood by and allowed the torturous murder to happen. Only recently, after 56 years, have lawmakers started to remove the very qualified immunity that allows police to kill so easily without repercussions. It takes this country far too long to adapt to any new information. There’s always heavy push-back by those who benefit. Resistance is beautiful, but refusing to change is hideous.
Then there’s the lucrative education and healthcare costs that Americans simply cannot afford. When you want to get educated and decide to pursue a college degree, you’re forced into excruciating debt that will take you years to pay off. So, you decide to do it anyway, because that’s what your parents told you to do and that’s statistically what will make you the most money. You wanna get woke, so you pick up a Bachelor’s degree after 4 years of massive loans. You join the outstanding $1.8 trillion student debt pool. Then, like many of us, you jump into a liberal arts degree and pick up a job making $17 an hour post-college. You decide your job pays so little and is meaningless, so you go to graduate school and tack on more debt. After graduate school, you need a car to get to work and jump into the $1.2 trillion auto loan payment. But wait, you got laid off after two years, and your [insert injury here] and you’re in too much pain to look for work. Welcome to the $81 billion medical debt All-American exclusive club. Then, you can’t work because your goddamn [insert injury here] and hope to God that you have enough support to raise a GoFundMe, so that you won’t end up homeless.
Who is really benefiting from being an American? The Preamble to the constitution contains, “We The People…to ensure domestic Tranquility”. Does this only ensure that Americans are safe from civil war and not from predatory corporations or a selfish government? In the declaration of independence our forefathers wrote, “The Pursuit of Life, Liberty, and Happiness”. Who can possibly achieve happiness when the odds are so heavily stacked against you? It’s not a hard question to answer if you’re wealthy. But if you’re like the rest of us with a negative worth, it’s challenging to feel patriotic. It’s challenging to find the pursuit of happiness. They tell us to “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps”, but our back aches from the pains of our labor. We can’t even reach our shoes!
To call America beautiful, is insincere and full of deceit. A powerful country’s inhabitants surely shouldn’t be refusing to wear a simple face-covering to stop a deadly virus. To support Trump is to ignore our deadly history of revolution and to support King George III. Our country is the pariah of the developed world, drunk on hypocrisy, flourishing on war, full of anti-intellectuals who refuse to pick up a book, and rooted in tribalism. The most patriotic act we can do this Independence Day is to fashion ideas, organize and protest, and engage in civil disobedience to reverse the damages done to America by oligarchs, political cronies. We must revise our own racist and deceitful history, for the sake of future generations.
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Sources:
https://www.denverpost.com/2020/06/13/colorado-police-accountability-reform-bill/
https://www.aplu.org/projects-and-initiatives/college-costs-tuition-and-financial-aid/publicuvalues/employment-earnings.html
https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/american-debt-auto-loan-debt/
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/10/americans-are-drowning-in-medical-debt-what-to-know-if-you-need-help.html
Photo by https://unsplash.com/@shootdajay
