Do NOT Even Start with the Name Calling

I know two someones who celebrated yesterday not only as the Fourth of July, but as the anniversaries of  their birthdays as well.  And I know another someone yesterday who was celebrating her one year return from that mountainous paradise so many call Afcrapistan. I guess for any of at least three reasons that would explain the parades and the fireworks. I'm waiting to see the size of the celebration we have for all of those who are currently overseas when they finally come home (and that means Horn of Africa, Bosnia, Colombia, Gitmo and a half dozen other places I've either forgotten or have never known about).

Most of the Northeast sweltered yesterday as the middle Atlantic states still struggled with electricity and access to it, problems as a result of storms earlier in the week. I discovered I can still learn new things, though so far not today (but I am optimistic) as I came across an amazing speech by Frederick Douglass, delivered exactly 160 years ago.

For those in love with the Bling-Crunk-Rap-Crap I see on the music TV stations with the Gangsta/Ho Video, try this on for size in terms of anger, in terms of emotion, in terms of eloquence and, all these decades later, in terms of timeliness. Pull up your pants, home fry, and turn your ball cap around your act is so faded.      

THUGLIFE? Please. How in the moment is this: "Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me.

"This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony."

I hope your Fourth, our Fourth, was good but that today and all the days that remain are great and greater than the sum of the hours of which they are made and that we finally succeed at that which we have striven our whole lives, a color and bias free society, built on equality of opportunity and beholden only to each of its citizens pledged to its success. Where words are subordinate to deeds and action is everything.
-bill kenny