July 4th, Memorial Day 2023.  And feelings that well up?  Emotions are involuntary…  Patriotism?  Love-of-country?  Perhaps I should just fix a standard American flag to the front of the garage door, a flag purchased from Amazon, or from the local Menards, –let that action suffice…  Should I join the apathy, that bland, happy indifference of my neighbors?   Shall I find a place for myself at the end of a row, in the rear of the white-majority Independence Day marching parade…

I cannot.  We have many problems now.  At present untold millions are under-employed and underpaid.  We have a economically bifurcated country, — the few who are living extraordinarily well, at the expense of the many.

The injustice has racial and class precursors.  The nation was founded at a time when whites imported blacks from Africa…  The slavers dominated the society of Southern states.  They were willing to wage war, to “burn the house down” to continue to enslave other human beings.  Perhaps as many as 850,000 died, the result of battle and of disease.

Women were prevented from voting until August 18, 1920, when the 19th Amendment was ratified.  Women still find themselves as a sub-class, when it comes to equality of pay, and health care.  The “red states,” many from the old Confederacy, and states in the west embracing the “self-made man tradition” have passed laws that forbid women freedom of choice with respect to reproductive health care.

I could go on.

Have we reached a cul-de-sac, that end of the line for this grand experiment in “democracy?”  Is it wrong to believe that I, that my country is indispensable…

Some believe a return of the “good ole days,” is worth burning the house down again…

All of us are dispensable.

Would it not be more advisable
to live in the swarm
and to make up to individuals the sins
that should and must be committed
against all?
   To be foolish with fools,
      vain with the vain,
         and enthusiastic with enthusiasts?

Wouldn’t that be fair,
given such overweening deviation on the whole?
When I hear of the malice
of others against me—
isn’t my first reaction one of satisfaction?

Quite right! I seem to be
saying to them—
I am so ill-attuned to you and have so much
truth on my side that you might as well
have a good day at my expense whenever you can!

Here are my faults and blunders.
here my delusion, my bad taste, my confusion,
my tears, my vanity,
my owlish seclusion, my contradictions.
Here you can laugh. Laugh, then, and be merry!

I do not resent
the law and nature of things
according to which faults and blunders cause
merriment.

“To be sure,
times used to be more ‘beautiful’
when anyone with a halfway new idea
could still feel so indispensable that
he would go out into the street
and shout at everyone:
‘Behold, the kingdom of heaven is at hand!’
–I should not miss myself
if I were not there.

All of us are dispensable.”

–excerpt The Gay Science, Book 4, Section 311 by Friedrich Nietzsche