Why I Celebrate July 4th This Year
NOT to honor the slave-holding founding fathers but to celebrate the abolitionists, such as Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth, John Woolman, Sarah and Angelina Grimke, and countless others who worked so hard to raise the consciousness of Americans.
To celebrate African-Americans who endured horrors of so many kinds and managed to survive and contribute so much to American culture and serve so often as the conscience of the nation.
To celebrate MLK and Malcolm X, Angela Davis and Fred Hampton, Fannie Lou Hamer and John Lewis, Ralph Ellison and John Coltrane, Aretha and Beyonce, Bill Russell and Hank Aaron
NOT to honor the blessings of wealth of a nation that began with the theft of land and genocide of the indigenous people of the continent but to celebrateChief Joseph of the Nez Perce, Susan Shown Harjo, Deb Haaland and all the Indian leaders who have taught us how to respect the natural environment and how to resist aggression against a people’s lives and culture.
NOT to honor military victories and defeats in a litany of unjust wars but to celebrate the peacemakers and war resisters and our full history — ways in which women have built and preserved our society while patriarchy has tried to demean and silence them.
How I Will Celebrate
by wearing my hat with the U.S. flag on the front. The flag doesn’t belong to racists, sexists, or white nationalists any more than the country does. Anyone who shares the aspirations of the Preamble to the Constitution is a patriot. I’m not a nationalist but as I re-read the Preamble I realize again that those of us who resist the reactionaries in Congress and the Supreme Court and who fight for civil rights, social justice, and free and fair elections are the true patriots.
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We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
