What are we celebrating this 4

What were we celebrating this 4th of July?

For many of us, this 4th of July is a celebration for the year we went through. For many of us, we are lucky to be alive, to be healthy, to have survived a pandemic.

But if we are honest, we cannot celebrate freedom because we are not the home of free since so many people in this country are not free. 

So many people are not allowed the same freedoms that many white privileged people are.

So many people are locked up in cages, right here in the United States of America just for trying to come to the land of the free. A land that used to accept people from everywhere who were looking for a better life. People who were running away from a life where they didn't have rights or freedom of speech.

This was the land of milk and honey, this was a place where they could provide a better life for their children. We accepted them with open arms and now we put them in cages like animals, so is this our great America?

Are we celebrating the fact that we stole the land from the Native Americans for our own purpose and gain? That they don't have clean water or good medical care and that we are now trying to steal back the very small land we were nice enough to give them when we first stole it.

Is this what we are celebrating? 

How about the rights that we fought for and died for that are slowly being taken away now… rights of women, of our LGBT community, basic human rights for healthcare, maybe this is what we are celebrating? 

Maybe it's because hundreds of thousands of people are sick and still dying of this virus and yet our government has still not helped those in need still. While the politicians lined their pockets and still got paid and got to keep their mansions, while you go into every American city and people are living in the streets.

Maybe this year we are celebrating the fact that thousands of black men are brutalized in this country for no reason, by our own police officers who we pay to protect and serve. And yet for years we stood by and did nothing.

Maybe it's the fact that we made jails for-profit and allowed thousands of black men and women to rot there for years for petty crimes to line the bureaucrat’s pockets.

Maybe we are celebrating the fact that all of my black and brown friends are afraid, in their own country, a country we seem to have forgotten that we built on their slave backs. 

Please, please tell me what are we celebrating? I will tell you what I am celebrating, the fact that even though we are such a fucked up country, that so many men and women still want to lay down their lives to protect us, even when the problem is clearly on our own soil. 

I celebrate their lives and the lives of so many soldiers who have died for us. This is what they give us, freedom. Freedom to speak and write what we want to, freedoms that so many others do not have. They are so proud even though when they come home we treat them like shit, and the fact that we don't take care of them or their needs.

Now you can say I'm un-American, you can call me names but what you can't dispute is the cold hard facts….

We are no longer the land of the free and we are no longer the greatest country in the world.

And until we all are, until we all have the same rights, until we all realize that we all bleed red, that we are all one race, the human race.

Until we stop thinking we are better than others, on land we stole and killed and built on the backs of slaves then we will never be truly free.

“Be the change you want to see”

@Treadmilltreats