What to do this weekend - July 4th edition
A reading assignment.
Hi,
It's a holiday weekend, so I'm not doing the normal event calendar. Instead, here's a short, internet friendly numbered list of stuff you can do:
- See some art for First Friday, which is still happening tomorrow. (Although not every gallery is participating; the International Quilt Museum is closed and possibly others.)
- Check out the Nebraska History Museum, which is free to visit on July 4. (Hours are 9 am to 4 pm.)
- Celebrate a quiet, fireworks-free July 4 at the Branched Oak Observatory. (Currently they're planning to be open 1 to 5 pm, with possible evening hours if the weather is kind.)
- Not set off fireworks, especially near my house. (My guinea pig doesn't like loud noises.)
- Actually get around to putting up all the art that's been sitting the floor of your new place for weeks.
- Wait, that last one was from my personal to-do list. Not sure how that got in there.
And finally, on a serious note:
- Read Frederick Douglass's "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" (That's a link to a webpage version, but if you're feeling ambitious, here's a scanned copy of the original pamphlet published in 1852.)
Nearly 175 years later, Douglass's speech is still probably the sharpest and best analysis of the fundamental disconnect between the idealistic story America likes to tell about itself and, well, reality. In context, these lines are about slavery, but read them and tell me they aren't relevant to our country's treatment of immigrants, trans people and every other marginalized community whose freedoms are constantly under threat:
There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the every day practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
You'll probably be inundated with breathless affirmations of patriotism all weekend. And I'm not here to make you feel bad or guilty for loving America if that's your thing. But loving your country also means confronting the parts of it that make you uncomfortable. As I wrote when I reviewed the Sheldon's Hyphen American exhibit earlier this year:
I'm not exactly eager to celebrate America's upcoming semiquincentennial. My sense of national pride has never been strong. It's hard to be patriotic and still have a functioning conscience at the best of times; and it's much harder now, during the Really Bad Times we're suffering through. I don't hate the United States. But I can't love it unconditionally; we've done too much harm, at home and abroad, for me to speak the phrase "I'm an American" without a concurrent feeling of shame.
Have a great weekend.
~ Ty
