On this Fourth of July, 2019…
On this Fourth of July, the celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I want to simply bring up two things.
For one, if you have not read Frederick Douglass’ infamous 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth July”, you should. It’s easily the one of the finest speeches in American history. You can do so here.
If listening is more of your thing, then Academy Award® winner James Earl Jones has you covered:
The second thing is that while Douglass was specifically talking about slavery, he may as well have been talking about the singular issue that has afflicted the United States since its inception — that despite the veneration of historical figures, documents, and institutions, the dignity of an individual human being is still regarded as conditional, even if our better laurels insist that it’s unconditional.
We may not have state-sanctioned slavery anymore, but we do have a clear and present issue that, collectively, there’s too many of us that are just fine with our caste system.
There’s still a vast swath of individuals in this country that feel that they still have to fight for their dignity as human beings because either the government, society at large, or both fail to recognize it. The American system, or rather our Americanized caste system, promulgates this through buzzwords of “personal liberty” and “personal responsibility” because there are those of us that dare not wish to accept the reality that we have degree of responsibility towards each other as part of a civilized society and a nation.
This isn’t a “socialist” conclusion as some detractors would say; regardless of of your political persuasion, if you deny that this reality exists then you are completely comfortable with gaslighting yourself — never mind what the incumbent administration does. This is still a nation where your skin color, your economic standing, your ethnic history, your location, or a combination of the aforementioned can still determine your course in life. You could still be the most law-abiding, college-educated, “civilized” human being, but the wrong combination can have damning consequences.
True freedom, true liberty is not only the absence of an overbearing government, but ability to exist and maximize your individual potential without wealth, or specifically, the lack there of, being a glass ceiling; without skin color being a factor; without sexual orientation being a factor; without gender being a factor.
