Over at Broadly, a subsidiary of Vice, a leftist writer named Leila Ettachfini felt compelled to offer anti-Trump readers an answer to the conundrum that is undoubtedly plaguing all of the #Resistance on this first week of July: How can we celebrate Independence Day when “America is a constant disappointment?”
Well, gee, for one thing: America isn’t The Government. If it was, we might have been struck by that very same puzzle from January 2009 to January 2017. The government was indeed a “constant disappointment” during those years, but it certainly didn’t affect our ability to celebrate this country or the many freedoms it has provided itself and the world.
Even in the darkest days of the Obama administration, we knew it would take a hell of a lot more than one bad president to destroy everything that made the United States the greatest country in the world. Granted, our faith was shaken about the future on more than a few occasions, but that still didn’t keep us from celebrating Independence, which had literally nothing to do with Barack Obama in the first place.
Alas, the left – somewhere around the middle of Obama’s presidency – convinced themselves through their own propaganda that America had changed, fundamentally and irrevocably. Suddenly, everyone (other than those despicable WHITE MEN) was in agreement that the police were racist monsters and that socialized medicine was the right direction for the U.S. and that, generally speaking, the founding of the country was a distasteful mistake that we would go back and erase the moment science provided us with a time machine. Thus, they are still in a kind of shock about the current administration and the realization that, no, a hell of a lot of Americans like this country the way that it is, thank you very much.
Knowing all this, Leila Ettachfini’s screed will come as less of a shock:
America has always been bad, no matter who the president is or was. Since Trump’s election, however, the qualities that make America particularly bad—racism, sexism, homophobia, the institutionalized manifestations of each of these, et cetera—have been emboldened, forcing many people to reckon with the ugly reality of their beloved USA. “This is not America,” I keep hearing. But the truth of the matter is that family separation, a disregard for Black lives, homophobia, and every other incarnation of white male supremacy are exactly what America is made of. In light of that, celebrating the Fourth of July in the spirit of patriotism may sound far from appealing. Here are some alternative ways to celebrate the Fourth of July that include less blind nationalism and more uplifting communities that American institutions have so long worked against.
We’re not even going to get into her stupid ideas of “alternative” ways to celebrate the Fourth, but suffice to say, they involve giving money to minorities and indigenous communities and reading socialist poems and so forth. It’s generally just another reminder of how much the left despises this country and how our survival as a nation depends on keeping them as far away from the control panel of power as possible.
But then, you already knew that.
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