Since becoming an adult celebrating the 4th of July has always felt strange to me.  As a kid, all you had to do was offer me cake and ice cream and I could celebrate anything.  No questions asked.  Adulthood has meant that I cannot celebrate some things.  It is a matter of knowing too much; knowing that life is complex, a mixture of light and darkness, and a sense of how difficult it is to tell the difference.

I was born a citizen of this country.  I have experienced ease of social movement because I am a white male.  Due to good fortune, a good education has enabled a modicum of self awareness.  I now have the blessing of a good family, that is getting even better, due to three grandchildren and a fourth soon to arrive.  I am aware that nearly everything that I’ve mentioned is due to chance, luck, the wild-hare lottery of Nature.  There are many ways to express the “throwness” of one’s situation in life.  Life is many things.  I am certain that it is a throw of the dice, over and over, endlessly.

When on the 4th of July, when everyone commences to celebrate the founding of the nation, I quietly ask myself how I can celebrate?  How do I just forget about the systematic cruelty…..  What about the Cherokee who were exiled from the Blue Ridge mountains and made to walk to Oklahoma?  Oh, that was then.  We do not do such things now.  But then I know of the children forcibly separated from their parents at our southern border.  Children  are kept in detention facilities that were meant for adults, in squalid conditions.  They are to be lessons to others who might otherwise come here.  A child reduced to an object lesson.

It is impossible for me to forget the Civil War, as I grew up in the south.  My great uncle fought in Lee’s army.  The Planters living in the south, an economy built upon slave-holding, was defended at a cost of four years of war: casualties, disabled, starvation, misery, and wide spread wrecking of southern countryside.  And yes, slavery is now illegal.  That does not mean that people of color are accorded equal opportunity, equal benefit-of-the doubt by comparison with their Caucasian fellow citizens.  If you are a person of color, it is a good idea to avoid contact with the police.

It is no secret that America has been less than kind, accommodating to the nations in this hemisphere.  The Monroe doctrine and the war with Spain,  forced Cuba, and the Philippines to become colonies.  The other central American countries became client states of America due to the economic might of the United Fruit Company.  American military might, and economic advantage has been exercised without restraint.  Freedom has been maximized for we Americans,–but often at the expense of someone else’s freedom.  Just to be clear, colonization is the imposition of economic servitude upon another people.  Perhaps a less egregious form of slavery, but slavery none the less.

Despite knowing all of that, I always enjoy a 4th of July parade.  I don’t mind acknowledgement of the military.  The military are as important, but no more important, than good governance, or small business enterprises that provide services, provide income for families in a town.  I like the representation of education, in the form of high school marching bands.  I also salute, the odd display of a hard working rock n roll band passing on a flat-bed truck.  Life itself is like the back beat of the drum, and the wild guitar riff of a rock n roll anthem.  “Smoke on the Water” anyone? All of that …. is life at this juncture in our country.

Having said that, I cannot abide M1 Abrams battle tanks flanking the speakers podium, to underline our President’s intent to be the sole source of authority; to be the government, in his own person.

Old habits die hard, as it is said.

We are haunted by the ghosts of our past.