We made strawberry ice cream. We ate summer foods and did our best not to melt. My nearly five-year-old niece and my cousins' nearly two-year-old child chased one another around the island in the kitchen hissing at one another and air-clawing and giggling like a couple of baby werewolves. I have been saying that I am celebrating the Fourth of July like Pesach this year: tell the story of our freedom and since all people are not free, open the door to the stranger, let all who come in. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
a_reasonable_man told me about July 4, 1854, when Massachusetts abolitionists decorated their homes with black crape for the public mourning of Liberty because Anthony Burns had been taken back from his free life in Boston to slavery in Richmond with a full escort of federal troops in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Act. William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution. Today there were protesters at the Statue of Liberty, Therese Patricia Okoumou who climbed as far as the statue's robes and said she would not come down until the children were freed and is now in police custody. The problem with America is not that it is irredeemable; the problem with America is that it has always been somebody's dream and somebody's nightmare. We have always had to choose pieces of our country to fight for and pieces of our country to fight. I have been seeing a particular line from the Declaration of Independence making the rounds on social media: "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." Celebrate that; don't fetishize it; do it better from now on.
a_reasonable_man told me about July 4, 1854, when Massachusetts abolitionists decorated their homes with black crape for the public mourning of Liberty because Anthony Burns had been taken back from his free life in Boston to slavery in Richmond with a full escort of federal troops in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Act. William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution. Today there were protesters at the Statue of Liberty, Therese Patricia Okoumou who climbed as far as the statue's robes and said she would not come down until the children were freed and is now in police custody. The problem with America is not that it is irredeemable; the problem with America is that it has always been somebody's dream and somebody's nightmare. We have always had to choose pieces of our country to fight for and pieces of our country to fight. I have been seeing a particular line from the Declaration of Independence making the rounds on social media: "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." Celebrate that; don't fetishize it; do it better from now on.
