CAPE COD – Independence Day. It all feels so … normal. It is as if nothing has changed because nothing has changed, except for the United States of America.
It is the Fourth of July and we are supposed to celebrate America. And we will. We plan to see fireworks tonight. We have spent the day outside, and the touristy perfect world of Cape Cod looks like a celebration. There is red, white and blue everywhere.
And the weather on this fourth of July is spectacular, perfect in every way.
And yet. There’s an undercurrent. It’s there, and it’s not there. It’s so weird. Riding on the Shining Sea Bikeway in Falmouth on the Fourth of July feels like living in a movie where the bad stuff is happening just off screen.
We are aware of the bad guys. But in this upside down world, the bad guys have all the power. And what can we do? Celebrate freedom?
There is literally an American concentration camp being built in the Everglades. The secret police force of ICE is about to hire thousands more, and millions are going to lose their health insurance. This trouble is not over the bridges. It is coming, or is already here on Cape Cod.
And the nightmare narrative never ends. Every day there is a new headline, a new outrage… a new distraction. And the only ones who can actually stop it, the Republicans in Congress (or on the Supreme Court) will not stop the complete transformation of America into something unrecognizable.
But despite the small ugly bill, this remains, in fact, a big beautiful land with many wonderful people.
The world is sideways. There are demonstrations in the streets week after week. “No Kings,” we say as the President garners more and more power.
So here we are, on the 249th birthday of one of the greatest ideas in the history of the world – a land where all are created equal. We have never lived up to it. But the aspiration, opposed by many, was always there and served as a continual yet slow path towards progress.
Now we face a test. A test of our resilience and resolve. As we celebrate the universal truths we as a nation once found as “self evident,” we have no choice but try to remember that this country has been tested before and in the end we found, as Abraham Lincoln said, “the better angels of our nature.”
They are there, these better angels. We have witnessed them. We have met them. Happy Fourth of July to those better angels who walk among us. This is your country too.
These times are not normal. We recognize that. But this country is still a great idea. And we celebrate that, but we can’t help but wonder what kind of nostalgic yearning we are about to undergo for the past 249 years of mostly forward progress.
We are going to need all the better angels we can get.
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