Cooked: America 250
What's Smoking This Holiday is Us
It’s America’s birthday, and you can cry if you want to. We teeter at the edge of democracy. Fireworks and gunshots will punctuate the coming long weekend. The National Mall is a metaphor for our infected country: rotting, algae-choked, a carnival no one wants to go to, a punishing environment, and a populace exhausted and divided.
Happy Fourth of July.
The longest road trip this weekend is the one between the anachronistic fantasy of an America made great through cruelty and exclusion, and the grand America we could be — if only… maybe only, in our ancestors’ wildest dreams. That distance is part of who we’ve always been: a country that tells a story about what we are, and then makes the story a lie by the way we live every day — by the way we enforce policies, use resources, and treat people. There is more than enough reason to grieve and to be angry. And the power of those emotions is also utterly debilitating to us as a country.
But don’t be fooled that this is all about one moment, or one man. He is only the mirror we look into to see what we truly are. His fantasy of America is held up by a hundred senators, four hundred–odd members of the House, and millions and millions of Americans who go on clinging to the fantasy of an America that will position them as brutes atop the hill of the world — unaccountable in war, in the degradation of the environment, in the destruction of the very communities that are their lifeblood.
People of every perspective declare this country is cooked, that these are the last days of the empire. These days are apocalyptic — but the end is still not decided. What apocalypse is — what it always comes to teach us — is that we do not, and cannot, live in a fantasy. No matter how hard we run from reality, it persists — and the harder we run, the darker the days become. An America built on hate, division, denial, and delusion can never be a home of the brave.
My friend asked if I would celebrate this year, and I said I would, as much as any other year. My dude Frederick Douglass famously spoke on the contradictions of the holiday 174 years ago, in his speech “What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?” Still a banger. Poet Langston Hughes got right to the point: “America never was America to me.” These alternate odes remind us that as dark as these days are, they are not new to us. As united as we are in our righteous anger — if you align from a place of hate and fear, what you align with is the very worst of you, and the very least you can accomplish.
For myself, I feel the pull of it in my own life, day to day — how much easier it seems to sink into despair, to surrender to the hate, to begin to hate this country that is my only home. But I can’t live like that. What, for two more years? For twenty? Waiting for the promise to finally fulfill itself so I can breathe? I can’t wait. And I don’t have to. We can build on the knowledge that came before us, and use the new tools and alliances available to us, to keep trying to bridge the distance between the promise America has always made and the country America has always been. That is the state of the nation, and has been for 250 years: imperfect, resting on the backs of the people — with just the tiniest bit of power in our pocket that we refuse to cede.
To resist, we have choices. We can release the America that breaks your heart when you wake up every morning — or turn that terrible truth into a lie you float away from, off into a fantasy of an America the way it never was, now great again. A country with only a lie to cling to, as everything else we are falls away — as every piece of American architecture built to bridge the distance between the Declaration, the Constitution, and the reality on the ground gets blown up on purpose, by people who would make us all live only in a lie. So far, the people in positions of power who could slow the crazy seem inclined to dream.
So what is there to celebrate?
Despite all news reports to the contrary, you still live in the real world. Despite all the destruction wrought in the last two years, this country is still standing, and this country is still supposed to be a democracy. In some ways. It makes absolutely no sense that we continue to function — that this weekend there will be barbecues and fireworks, people sitting in the sun, hopefully with a delicious snack and a little bit of love. Is it sheer stubbornness, or is there something else that keeps propelling the idea of a country for and by the people ever forward?
We persist. The American experiment persists. It has always lived in this space of paradox — a state of unfinished-ness, a fragile dream ringed by a swirling sea of power and capital waiting to swallow it whole. Through slavery, through civil war, through lynching and exclusion and every other form of oppression this country has practiced as its lifeblood for 250 years — we persist. We persist in these pockets of joy, and we move the experiment forward not through wide corridors to certain power, but by building out we the people: making millions of spaces for the American dream to settle, pockets of tiny power, small-d democrats who refuse to cede to the sea. We keep going not just by widening the halls of power, but by making those tiny pockets — where we store our own individual power — bigger.
This country has never lived free of people who would use oppression and power to enlarge themselves. And this country has never stopped trying to be true to the promise it holds: that these truths are self-evident, that all people are created equal.
Eat your snacks. Love your people. Make your pocket bigger. And celebrate the fact that we persist — that the future is unwritten, and that we can be the ones to write it.