A 2025 Independence Day Manifesto: Why I'm Celebrating In Spite Of Everything

At the end of this post is a Substack article I wrote for Independence Day last year. And I'm going to be brutally honest:

My feelings about the Fourth of July – and about America – have not changed since then. In spite of everything, I still believe today is worth celebrating.

I know, I know. How can anybody with a heart or a soul, or with any semblance of care for humanity, possible be in a celebratory mood today? How on Earth can we feel proud of our nation when everything is falling apart and sliding backwards? Is there even anything about America to be proud of at all?

Yes, dear ones, there is.
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As I mentioned in my post a year ago today, my sixth great-grandfather chose to risk everything and fight in George Washington's army. I don't have any additional details about John Tubb, but I like to think that he joined the fight because he believed in a radical idea, one that continues to be an anomaly in the course of human history: that every human being has an innate right to shape the course of their own life. To be treated equally before the law and have their basic human rights protected. To speak, write, pray, and peacefully assemble as they wish, and, most crucially, to choose their own government.

That promise is what we're still fighting for today. As President Biden used to say while he was in office, Americans have never lived up to that promise, but we've never walked away from it, either. Horrible inhuman things have happened in our nation's history – the ethnic cleansing and genocide of indigenous Americans, the enslavement of Black Americans stolen from their homelands and degraded to the status of livestock (and continued to face systemic violence and discrimination even after their liberation, and often still do today), the unequal treatment of women and LGBTQ and disabled Americans, the exploitation of workers that required a deadly workplace disaster to be taken seriously.

Horrible inhuman things are happening right now. We have a would-be tyrant king terrorizing our people and a corrupt Supreme Court who has ruled that he can shred our blessed Constitution as he wishes. Billionaire technocrats are torching entire governmental departments that not only make our lives livable, but provide vital life-saving aid to vulnerable people around the world who have never known the type of freedoms and relative peace and security that we have here. Immigrants – documented and undocumented alike, and even some citizens – are being snatched off the streets by unidentified "officers" in civilian clothing and sent to squalid detention facilities with no guarantee they'll be released, no way to contact their families or legal representation, and deported to gods know where without due process. Politicians and talking heads are joking (or not) about feeding detainees to alligators in the Florida swamps. Mass shootings are a near-daily occurrence. Half of the US population no longer have the basic right to control our own bodies or access reproductive care. Hard-won LGBTQ rights are under attack, disabled people are at risk of losing workplace protections, dangerous and extreme censorship laws that were unthinkable a decade ago are being pushed through, and antisemitic hate crimes are at an all-time high. Our economy is on shaky ground and our standing on the world stage has plummeted. We are perilously close to a Christian nationalist takeover of the government. Political violence from the far right and the extreme left are threatening to shred the very fabric of our society. Environmental protections and investments in sustainable energy to protect our precious planet are being rolled back. As of this writing, millions of people are about to lose Medicare coverage and food assistance.

We're terrified. We're exhausted. Many of us are broke and sick and struggling to house, feed, and care for ourselves and our loved ones. In short, things really stuck right now.

But do you what else is happening?

People from across the political spectrum are showing up together. We're holding peaceful protests and rallies. We showed up en masse to demand No Kings and outshined Agent Orange's pitiful excuse of a military parade. We're boycotting the corporations determined to dominate ever facet of our lives, and the strategy is working. We're holding peaceful sit-ins and spamming our elected officials with phone calls, emails, and letters demanding they do better. We're donating to and volunteering for civil rights organizations that are fighting to protect the most vulnerable among us. We're stocking community fridges and showing up to support small local businesses and testifying against censorship and book bans. We're educating ourselves and others on what to do if we see someone being targeted for violence. We're standing up, pushing back, and saying no to fascism.

And this, my dears, is why I love my country in spite of everything. Not because it's perfect – far from it – but because when push comes to shove, we the people don't quit. We fight for ourselves and for each other. When things get tough, we demand change. As a people, Americans don't leave one another behind. Even in the darkest, most terrible moments in our nation's history, we've stepped up to help our neighbors and make our country the best it can be, even if we have to play the long game.

There are so many other things, too. I love being able to walk into a grocery store and hear five different languages being spoken. I love how this is one of the few nations on Earth where immigrants can become Americans and still keep their roots close (we have Latin-Americans, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Arab-Americans, European-Americans, Jewish-Americans, and countless others – we even have whole months dedicated to celebrating each other!). I love PBS and French fries and how each state in the Union has its own unique culture while still being part of one whole country. I love having a free press (let's make sure it stays that way, please) and knowing that I'm not going to be jailed or executed for practicing my religion (again, let's keep it that way). I love bluebonnets in the spring and pumpkin spice lattes in the fall (I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure we're the only country that really makes it a thing).

Yes, we're flawed – but name me a country that isn't?

Many years ago, when I was in community college, I met a woman from Iran. In her homeland, the regime was hunting her down for her work as a journalist. Thankfully, she received political asylum here. Her family, however, was not so lucky, and continued to face harassment and threats from the authorities. She came to give a talk about her experiences, why the free press is crucial for democracy to thrive, and warn against the dangers of authoritarianism.

Like many young people, I was full of outrage over the injustices in our country (I call it my "burn it down" phase). But as I listened to her story, something shifted within me. I got the chance to speak with her after her talk. I told her that sometimes I felt so angry with and ashamed of America, but even though I knew there places in the world where people had it much worse, I had never really appreciated that reality before.

I'll never forget what happened next. She took my hands, looked me in the eyes, and said:
"Yes, but you're free. To do whatever you want to."

I'm grateful that I was born here. I wish that so much of the last ten years had never happened, that I could wave a magic wand right now and stop it all. I miss pre-2016 America, for all its shortcomings. But if it had to be this way, I'm grateful that I have a chance to honor my sixth great-grandpa's legacy by fighting in my own way to make America all that it can be. What it wants to be, I believe, in its own way. I refuse to give up on it, because that means surrender. Giving up is not the answer. "Burning it all down" is not the answer.

If we give up now, they win.

If we "burn it all down," what will we have left?

This is our country. They don't get to take it away from us without a fight. They don't get to rank us in order of who is the most American, who is the most human. As bad as things are right now, we are not the first generation of Americans to face the dangers of authoritarianism, and we can call on those who came before us, who fought for us even if they would never see the society they hoped to create, for strength and hope in this moment. We're not alone. We have each other. We can choose to build instead of burn.

So yes, today I'll be wearing my cutesy little light-up red, white, and blue star necklace and making an icebox cake with strawberries and blueberries and whipped cream to resemble our beautiful flag. I'll be donating to the American Library Association and doing a special ritual to put a little bit of my energy towards fixing what's broken. I'll be celebrating because celebration and hope and joy are resistance. They're the only way through. And if we hold onto them, even if purely out of spite, we'll get there together.

Happy 250th Birthday, America.

(PS: If you're a 90s kid, and you grew up watching a certain show on PBS where you learned all about the American Revolution, and you need a little bit of nostalgic comfort and inspiration today, cue:)

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A Fourth of July Manifesto For the Rest of Us:
On America and what the hell even is patriotism in 2024.

Originally published to Substack on July 4th, 2024.

I couldn’t tell you the last time I celebrated Independence Day. For the longest time, it seemed to me as though there was nothing to celebrate, no pride to feel in this nation where so many wrongs have yet to be put to right. But this year, strange though it may sound, I feel inclined to do so. And I’m going to start by sharing something I’ve never talked about publicly before.
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My grandfather (whom we grandkids affectionately called “Peep'“) was an avid genealogist. A few years ago, before he died, I learned through his research that I have a direct ancestor — my sixth great-grandfather, to be precise — who fought in the American Revolution. His name was John Tubb. I don’t know anything else about him; not his age, birthplace, profession, family life, or his reasons for picking up a musket and joining Washington’s army. But I like to think that maybe he was a man ahead of his time, that he chose to fight against a tyrannical king, and accept the terrible consequences to follow if the king came out on top, because he really believed that all people are created equal and deserve to live their lives in peace and freedom.

The America that he fought for has never completely come to fruition. It’s stained, as we all know, with a bloody legacy of genocide and land theft of Indigenous peoples, chattel slavery and brutal subjugation of Black people, discrimination against immigrants of various origins, sexism against women and violence against queer folks, and capitalist exploitation of poor people and the planet on which we all live. Becoming aware of these not-so-celebratory blights in our nation’s history is a little like opening Pandora’s box — once you see it, you can’t ever go back to unseeing it. For most of my adult life, it felt morally wrong to observe Independence Day: how could I, in good conscience, celebrate a holiday that represents freedom to some but oppression to others? How could I take pride in my country when there is so much in our past and present to be ashamed of? When displays of the American flag and red, white, and blue color palettes have become symbols of post-9/11 nationalism and, since 2016, a disgusting allegiance to a would-be dictator and his cult of gun-worshipping Christofacists hellbent on warping America into an autocratic nightmare based on their false notions of a mythological past?

I don’t pretend to have all of the answers. I don’t. But after the Supreme Court’s disastrous ruling last week that has turned the office of the Presidency into, for all intents and purposes, a monarchy, I do know one thing: my ancestor John Tubb would not stand for it.

I’m someone who deeply believes in the power of connecting with our ancestral lineages to heal ourselves and repair the world (and to give credit where credit is due, I learned about the concept of ancestor work and what it entails from Black and Indigenous practitioners and thinkers, and I’m constantly grappling with the question of how to engage with it in a conscious and anti-racist way as a white Euro-American person). My sixth great-grandfather put his life on the line because he believed in the promise of a country where a person’s circumstances at birth would not set the course of their life in stone. Where people could speak, worship, and live on their own terms. Where the government did not operate on the whims of a single person of privilege, but by the voices of everyday people. America has never lived up to that promise, but it has also never stopped trying to meet it. Nor should it. Nor should we.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it really means to be a patriot. It’s a loaded term these days, and maybe it always has been. But in my view, patriotism does not mean blind allegiance to a nation-state, and it certainly does not mean religious devotion to a demagogue. I believe that patriotism is standing up for what is right even when it’s dangerous to do so, showing up for your neighbors when the going gets rough, and refusing to back down in the face of bullies and tyrants. It’s not about putting your country on a pedestal and denying its flaws, but seeing things as they are — good, bad, ugly, pretty — and doing the best you can with what you have to make it better for everyone. It’s not about believing your country is the best, but about seeing and believing in the promise of all it can be.
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America was never “great” in the way that the MAGA cult envisions it. But in spite of everything, this Fourth of July, I’m choosing to believe that it can be great in the way that we — everyday people like my sixth-great grandfather who dream of a peaceful, healthy, and whole world — envision it. I’m choosing to believe in what America could be. What it wants to be, I think, in some strange way. I’m choosing to believe that it is redeemable. I’m choosing to believe in it because if I don’t, then what is left? When the alternative is allowing the pain and anger and fear and despair to drown us and silence us, which is exactly what those trying to rip our freedom from us want?

I refuse to give them what they want. I refuse to let them rewrite our history so they can destroy our future. I refuse to let them take our flag, our colors, and the potential of what America can become and twist them into symbols of violence, domination, and fascism. I refuse to let them tell me that the country where I was born and have lived out my life and where my ancestor fought for the idea of human dignity and equality doesn’t belong to me, or to my friends and loved ones, because we don’t fit their small-minded idea of what a “real” American should be.

Real America is all of us.

I never could have imagined writing these things even just a year or two ago. But today, when we are millimeters away from losing the democracy that John Tubb fought for, I think celebrating Independence Day is a radical thing to do. I’m calling on my sixth-great grandpa to lend me some of his fighting spirit today. I’m calling on my child-self who loved sparklers and Liberty’s Kids and had a red, white, and blue sundress with little embroidered stars that my Peep gave me when I was ten that I wore all summer because I thought it was so pretty. I’m calling on the countless people throughout this nation’s history of all colors, origins, genders, sexualities, and faiths who risked everything — and sometimes paid the ultimate price — because they believed that with enough blood, sweat, and tears it really could become a place with liberty and justice for all. Today I’ll be baking a peach pie and going to a friend’s pool party where I’ll eat vegetarian hot dogs and enjoy the hell out of myself, and tomorrow I’ll get back to trying not to panic and figuring out where I can help push this ship in another direction while we still have time to avoid the iceberg.

It’s Independence Day, but let’s also remember (to paraphrase one of my mutuals on Instagram) that we are all interdependent on each other, too. If we can remember that, then I choose to believe we’ll have a fighting chance.

Happy Fourth of July.
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Happy Birthday, America.

"The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, 'although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,' wrote Orwell, tends to be 'uninterested in what happens in the real world.' Nationalism is relativist, since the truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiˆs put it, nationalism 'has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.' A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well – and wishing that it would do better."

Timothy Snyder
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, 2017

"But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Abraham Lincoln
Gettysburg Address
​November 19th, 1863

via GIPHY