Editor's Note: It has been a beautiful week. I got sunburned at the beginning and felt cool breezes by the end. I’m reminded of running free as a kid and my gramma doctoring my burnt shoulders with baby oil. I want to remind you that you are living in a country built on freedom of movement, thought, and speech. It is perfectly normal to feel anxiety when threats to those freedoms are real, and it is quite possible the silver lining to come will be a reaffirmation of democratic principles and social improvements. Perhaps the wakeup call we have needed.
I went to an NFL game this weekend and watched a group of strangers become Americans at halftime. They raised their hands and swore an oath, and then a long applause broke across the stadium. I’m not sure if I would have paid as much attention to it as I am now. Maybe it’s the obvious threat against American norms. It is striking that a process we should be proud of, immigrating and becoming a US citizen, has been demonized by a self-serving, fabricated ideology. It made me think about the recent episode of masked cowards who used July 4th to march in Washington.
Yet here in front of me, despite all the present attempts to stop or slow the process, a group of new citizens took the oath. People from all over the world standing together on the fifty-yard line.
I did not expect it to land the way it did. I’ve been thinking about it about as much as the outcome of the game (all good).
Go to an NFL game sometime and look at the seats instead of the scoreboard. Then look at the field, the crew, and the staff along the sidelines. Every color, every accent, every kind of belief, sitting and standing shoulder to shoulder over something as gloriously unimportant as a football game.
But sport is more than a field of action. It provides a common language. I remember going to baseball games with my father but I could carry a conversation with anyone of his age or mine because of my knowledge of the game. Sports provide a medium in which nobody has to agree on anything except a love of the game.
It needs to be the same thing when it comes to love for country.
That is a far cry from the lie that groups such as Patriot Front and the Proud Boys try to push. They walk a few blocks in a town, film it, get back into the rented trucks, and post the video. It is shot to look like a nation reclaiming itself with the flags and salutes and chants, but what it actually documents is a bunch of guys either dropped on their heads, unhappy with their lives, or looking for a cause that gives them purpose. They are producing evidence for a history that never was, hoping enough people watch it to believe it already did.
I have read American history most of my adult life, and nothing in it holds me the way our sin of racism does. How this country has treated Black Americans, Native Americans, and a rainbow of immigrants, and how cowardly we still are about saying it plainly.
We have so many stories of Americans beautifully unique and diverse who chose to fight for this country, their country, only to lose more than anyone should have to lose.
Crispus Attucks, a man who had run from slavery, was the first to fall on King Street in 1770, five years before anyone got around to declaring a revolution. Roughly five thousand Black men served in the Continental Army. Eighty-five years later, one hundred eighty thousand put on Union blue, close to one in ten of the army that saved the republic.
In the Second World War more than a million served in an army that segregated them by regulation. The Nazis printed leaflets for Black soldiers pointing out, accurately, that German troops treated them better than the local rednecks back home did. They fought anyway, under a banner they invented for themselves, the Double V. Victory over fascism abroad. Victory over racism at home. Two enemies, one uniform.
Then they came home and still had to fight to make America free at home. We do not say plainly enough that America before 1965 was not a democracy in many parts of the United States. It was a republic with an asterisk, a system that counted some citizens and cheated on the rest.
Black Americans removed the asterisk. Not Congress on its own, not the courts on their own. People who got beaten on bridges and buried in earthen dams, attacked by dogs and blasted with water cannons, until the law finally caught up to the promise. The Voting Rights Act was not a gift the country gave. It was something the country was made to do.
I am proud of my Black fellow Americans, and all that they have experienced and sacrificed to get us to where we are. So when a man in a mask tells you this land is his by blood, when you see our government downgrading military men of color, or when you see an arm of the federal government sanctioned to round up a variety of humans…
A country that openly denigrates and criticizes its own is on borrowed time.
America has the most impressive record of endurance and civic construct built out of diversity that has ever been produced.
We will lose it if we do not relish it.
A man in Waterloo, New York cleaned out his garage and found three hundred pages of once-secret accounts from Americans held in Nazi prison camps, These are records the National Archives did not even know were missing. The news tracks the actions of a few men who went through hell. The truth is the country was built by a million stories like these. Ordinary Americans doing extraordinary things, and every time one surfaces, the better we all are for it.
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This piece offers yet another reason for going solar. There is a safety factor in moving toward more decentralized power. As Ukraine gets pounded for its fight to stay free, it turns to alternative energy to make it harder to put millions into a cold winter darkness. https://kyivindependent.com/as-russia-attacks-ukraines-grid-solar-offers-a-path-to-resilience/
Back around July 4th, the NYTimes did a brilliant series on forgotten founding fathers. This one was a good read, and obviously the paper enjoyed putting it together. It includes some history you may not be familiar with on how divisions among early Christians in colonial America ultimately led to the separation of church and state. The Baptist minister John Leland was in the middle of it all, known to both Madison and Jefferson, and he used his preaching to protect religious freedom by ensuring a state, or a centralized form of government, would not come to dominate it and choose for people instead of people choosing their own spiritual path. Know your history so you don’t get taken advantage of.
Executive Vice President, The Trump Organization
This is the incredible power of good old-fashioned journalistic digging for facts and reporters who follow leads to get to the truth. This is the story of the week, and maybe of the year. Read the pieces at the links. In any other time, with any other president, this would be scandalous to the point of impeachment. Why? Because we have an administration that has bent over backwards to reward our enemies and punish our friends. While the administration is busy trying to paint Canadians and Europeans as problematic peoples, the family cozies up to one of Putin’s famous grifters, who does what? Pays for the son’s wedding.
What people need to understand is this. This mafioso administration is only interested in peace or war, it doesn’t matter, as long as it means making money. There is no such thing as right or wrong, American principles, or putting the country first. It is that simple. Follow the reporting. This family is an abomination to American principles, and this revelry in luxury with enemies of freedom is what will upend the American experience.
Unless we learn from it and hold such individuals accountable.
The language hasn't caught up to the news. We're fixing that.
Promisery, n. Promise crossed with usury. Buying a vote with money that does not exist, on the bet that enough people are either conned by the arithmetic or miserable enough to take any offer at all.
Four dividends promised, one paid, and that one out of a budget that already existed. The rest was promisery.
Promisery is always announced before a vote and payable sometime after it.
The Endless Dance
Marc Yacht
How they spin, dip, and step
The music loud and fast
Masked with colorful costume
Prancing, cavorting about the room.
A world outside the chamber
Lost to the joy of the dance
The revelers see only each other
Laughing, twirling, mindless.
No music outside this hall
The struggle increases
The anger grows closer
Play on the conductor calls
Certainly a joyful party for the few
An endless dance of joy
Within an eternal darkness
That can never see the light.
How was this issue?
Thank you for reading this far, and for being the kind of person who would. I appreciate feedback and shares.
Always strive to be a good human.