The fragile Fourth

 Today we celebrate our nation's 249th birthday, and there will be flags and speeches and burgers and 'dogs on the grill, and somewhere your drunk Uncle Carl, all jazzed up on Busch Light and patriotic fervor, will come thisclose to blowing off four or five fingers or toes.

The American Experiment meets "ER." Happens every July 4.

What doesn't always happen is the American Experiment meeting madmen who would undo it in the name of saving it.

It has become almost cliche in these bizarre times to say America has become a dark place hijacked by the aforementioned madmen, but as with most cliches much truth attends it. This is not, demonstrably and fundamentally, the America envisioned by our founders. Whatever truths they held as self-evident have become Fake News under our current regime, which traffics in the paranoia, fear-mongering and false grievance that always fuel autocratic governments.

Everyone's out to get us, according to the Regime. And so it's America's duty -- its patriotic duty -- to get them before they get us. America First, right?

This is how gardeners and laborers and people just living their lives become enemies of the state. It's how winners of the Purple Heart are forced to self-deport. It's how others -- so many others -- get snatched off the street and disappeared because they had the bad luck to be born with an Hispanic surname, or committed the misdemeanor of crossing the border without the proper papers five or 10 or 20 years ago. 

It's how we get to a place where the President of the United States, the governor of Florida and the Armband Barbie running Homeland Security pose in front of cages in a concentration camp, and yuk it up at the thought of some poor migrant who's never harmed a soul being eaten by alligators.

This is not America, friends and neighbors. This is, rather, America turned upside-down, a mean, alien land where cruelty is seen as strength and the most despicable elements rule. Where we afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable, short-sheeting the most vulnerable in our society in order to shove more wealth into the hands of those already sitting on an Everest of wealth.

Where we allocate more money than some nations spend on their armies to paramilitary street punks cosplaying as law enforcement.

America as police state? Seems we're right around the corner from that now.  

And, sure, maybe that's me plunging off the deep end like the rest of the country, but maybe it's also me seeing things through history's lens. Truth is, none of what's happening in America now is new, and there are numerous examples of where it leads. And if we're going to be honest about it, America has at times been one of those examples.

We are a nation of lofty ideals, but we're also a nation that has occasionally strayed from those ideals. Lady Liberty may hold her lamp high, but the anti-immigrant mania we're seeing now is merely the latest thread in a long and ugly tapestry of bigotry. Hispanics, primarily, are its targets this time around; at other times, it's been the Germans or the Irish or the Asians or the Eastern Europeans -- and that doesn't even get into the  holocaust of slavery and Jim Crow that kept the Africans who built America in chains both literal and symbolic.

Land of the free and home of the brave? Pretty words, but not always true.

And yet ...

And yet, for all of that, I will wave my flag today. I will do it for the founders and for their vision, no matter how many times it's been vandalized. I will do it for those Americans who understand that vision, and who do what they can for the marginalized and disadvantaged left eating the Regime's dust. 

I will do it for the America that stood up to Hitler and Tojo, and went to the moon, and  spearheaded the Berlin Airlift. I will do it for the America that once reached out to alleviate suffering around the world without asking what was in it for us.

That's the America I still believe in, not this one. Not this I-got-mine Regime that decided money spent to tend to the world's sick, hungry and impoverished was a giant scam because the Regime wasn't getting a proper cut.  

Those people I won't think about today.  Instead, on this most fragile of Fourths, I'll do what I always do: Cue up the Declaration of Independence episode of the HBO series "John Adams." Only this time I'll come at it from a different angle.

This time, I'll watch it not as an affirmation of America, and what makes it America.

This time, I'll watch it wondering how we get back to that.