Independence Day Post-Mortem

You probably have one or more in your neighborhood as well: the bozo who purchased a boxcar's worth of what sounded like M-80s for Independence Day but didn't quite use them all up and will now throw them around after dark for probably much of the remainder of this month or until they manage to hurt themselves because of a lack of caution (fingers crossed; and that body part chosen for a reason).

Sorry for sounding so grumpy, post-holiday. 

I hope yours was whatever you wished it to be. Most of the Northeast and large parts of the rest of the country have sweltered for nearly a week as a result of a heat dome and the thunderstorms and lightning it produced. I spent part of the Fourth in an air-conditioned house, rereading an amazing speech by Frederick Douglass, delivered 174 years ago in July 1852.

For those in love with the Bling-Crunk-Rap-Crap I see on music TV where we pretend it's art (at least I do), try this on for size in terms of anger, emotion,  eloquence, and, all these decades later, 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, grounded by equity, built on equality of opportunity and beholden only to each of its citizens pledged to its success. 
-bill kenny

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