Happy Fourth?

 

Next to Christmas, the Fourth of July was my favorite holiday. When I was small, it meant going to the Bay Shore Marina for the day and evening. My brother and I played and swam in the Great South Bay with our cousins while our parents yakked or took a swim themselves. Later, we would change into play clothes and play tag. Anticipation began to grow as our dads grilled hamburgers and hotdogs and our moms set out the tablecloths and salads. The wait until fall dark became a difficult test of our patience. The wait would pay off with a fabulous Grucci display of bright colors and loud booms.

When my family moved to Maryland, one of the activities I missed deeply was the Grucci fireworks and playing with my cousins. About 5 years later, we “discovered” Ocean City, Maryland. We went for a week every summer. What was special was that My cousins’ family would come, and we’d all rent a house together for a week.

One year, my family went the week of July 4. My uncle was unable to get away from work and so my cousins’ family were unable to join us. I was 16 and lonesome. I decided I would walk the boardwalk downtown and hang out on the beach to watch the fireworks. My 14-year-old brother wasn’t interested in going with me, and I planned to go alone.

My dad said he’d go with me. That was a surprise. I knew my father loved me, but we weren’t that close. At that age, I hadn’t learned sign language, and communicating with my parents was difficult and frustrating. Looking back, I think he didn’t want me to go alone. I did feel more secure in his company. As it got darker, I didn’t have to worry about what to say anymore because he couldn’t read my lips anymore. So, we relaxed and waited. When the fireworks started to go off, my heart swelled with juvenile patriotism.

By that point, I’d had years of learning American history up to the point of the Revolutionary War. I knew the names of all the battles and the heroes during that time were figures I admired greatly.

The Boston Massacre in 1770 pretty much set things in motion. I’d learned that Crispus Attucks was the first American killed in the fight for independence. What I didn’t learn in school was that Attucks was a Black-Native American.

In school, we didn’t learn that Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, while he was in Philadelphia haggling with the Continental Congress to declare independence from Great Britain. She asked John Adams to “remember the ladies”. She wanted women’s rights to be included too so that they wouldn’t have to be so dependent on their husbands. We know where that went. “We hold these truths to be equal, that all men are created equal.”

I learned about Abigail’s plea after I’d graduated high school. In fact, I think I first heard it when I went to a play in American Sign Language at Gallaudet College, an adaptation of “1776”. 

I learned something else about the Declaration after seeing the play and then watching the movie.  “All men are created equal” didn’t literally mean any and all men. It meant all white men. The scenes in which members of the Continental Congress fought over whether or not to free slaves and count them equal were very disturbing.

There is a song in that movie that particularly upset me. It’s called “Molasses to Rum to Slaves”. In it, we learn that we can’t blame only the Southern planters for slavery.  Northerners, particularly in the Northeast, were also complicit.

 

Ugh. My Revolutionary heroes were tarnished. They were ordinary men who made mistakes.

I still enjoyed the Fourth. After I married and had children, Rich and I would walk to Town Center with the kids. They would play and every now and then come ask us if it was dark enough yet. The fireworks were awesome. There came a year when Rich’s heart had weakened, and he couldn’t walk the mile. However, we lived next door to the middle school, and they had a large field. We’d go there and we’d still see the fireworks.

Rich passed away in 2001, about 4 months before 9/11. Lee Greenwood came out with a very patriotic song, “Proud to be an American”. Americans came together after that devastating attack on us and it seemed everyone was singing that song. After I became active on Facebook and Blogger, I’d include a link to that song.

Not this year.

Americans are not pulling together anymore. We are not all equal.  There are forces driving us apart. Instead of North and South, we have Blue and Red. We have fascism vs. democracy.  White supremacists and christian nationalists are against Black people, immigrants, women’s rights to health choices, and the LGBTQ community. I suppose they feel threatened, fearing that they won’t be in the majority anymore. They've forgotten that America is supposed to be a melting pot.

The checks and balance system carefully construed by the Constitution’s writers have become askew. We have a corrupt Supreme Court undoing fundamental rights that were enacted during the Civil Rights movement. The Court’s ultra-right-wing conservative justices are hoping to further undo rights enacted in the 1970s. They began this slaughter of rights when they overturned Roe v. Wade.

We have had a deadlocked Congress for the last 20 years, it seems. Previously, Democrats and Republicans disagreed on almost everything but, for the sake of the country, they’d find common ground so they could compromise and get bills passed. In the 1990s, however, the Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, set in motion a “scorched earth” policy. The Republicans no longer were willing to find common ground and so Congress usually is at an impasse.

For a miserable four years, we had a malignant narcissist in the White House. I think the worst thing that man has done was to encourage white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other violent extremist groups to come out into the open to bully, threaten, and otherwise terrorize opponents. That awful man refuses to go away. He has been convicted of sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll, currently has 37 felony indictments over his mishandling and sharing of classified documents, and is at the center of investigations regarding his involvement in inciting the January 6, 2021 coup.

Almost half the country supports that man and would like to see him become President again. God forbid.

So no, I’m not playing “Proud To Be An American” because I’m not proud. I’m angry.

I will have my adult children come to visit and enjoy grilled chicken, corn on the cob, and salad. We will watch “1776”. I will enjoy their company, and the movie will remind me we still have far to go.

I will close with this link to Frederick Douglas’ "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro" speech delivered on July 5, 1852. Happy Fourth, I guess.

The Real RFK & His Awful Offspring

 

To me, he was always Bobby Kennedy.

I was little when he was the Attorney General to his brother, President John F. Kennedy. Later, as a teen and a young adult, I read and learned about the indispensable advice he gave to his brother throughout the crises facing our country.

I heard of him in a disparaging way during my junior high years. He was called a “carpetbagger” because he ran for NY Senator’s seat in Congress. I didn’t understand fully what a carpetbagger was until I read Gone With The Wind. Another accusation I heard was that he was ruthless.

He wanted to help people, especially those in need. His words were fiery sometimes but with the right message. I watched clips of his speeches, and I saw how crowds adored him. I thought he was very brave, standing up in a slowly moving car so that he could shake the hands of people who sometimes would grab hold and hang on. He was almost pulled from his car several times.

I didn’t see him speak to the crowd of people who came to hear him on the night Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. I read his words later and thought to myself, how in tune he was with what people were feeling. After all, hadn’t his own brother been assassinated? He advised the crowd to go home and pray. In other cities, people in grief and rage took to the streets and rioted. But not the people who’d come to listen to Bobby.

I wanted him to be President. I liked what LBJ had done in forming the Great Society and getting so much legislation passed for civil rights. But LBJ’s reputation was in shreds because of the Viet Nam war. Once Bobby’d declared his candidacy, LBJ did the smart thing and withdrew his consideration of running again.

I was aggravated because I was too young to vote, 13. I wanted to discuss Bobby with my parents, but it was too difficult. We were still communicating by lipreading with a few fingerspelled words or signs interspersed. It was hard to have a meaningful conversation, so we all avoided it as much as possible.

Besides, I knew my parents were solid Republicans. They weren’t in favor of civil rights. That always struck me as weird. They’d complain about how hearing people would take advantage of them, keeping them in menial jobs, and making fun of them. So why didn’t they sympathize with Black people? The only answer I’d get was “birds of a feather flock together” …in an ASL idiom meaning the same thing.

I was devastated at the news he’d been shot in California. The early reports said he’d been shot in the head but was being treated at the hospital. Maybe it’s not a bad wound, I thought and prayed for his life to be spared. The later news broke my heart. Now I heard that his wound was so grievous, that if he survived he would be severely disabled and not the man he was anymore.  Not long after that, I heard that he died.

I cried and cried. I cried at this cruel twist of fate that another Kennedy brother fell to the assassination. I cried for the loss of this country. He could have been a great President. I cried for myself and for my shattered faith in prayer. Why would God take another good man from us?

Well, that was 13-year-old me. Now I realize that it’s not God who perpetrates the evil in this world. It’s us, people. Angry people. People who are emotionally disturbed. Sociopaths.

With the loss of Bobby, the way was paved for Richard Nixon. We all know what a disaster that presidency ended up being.

What would our country have been like had Bobby lived?

Since Bobby died, we’ve suffered through the continuation of the Viet Nam into Laos and Cambodia. Watergate. Reagan’s trickle-down economics, which began the destruction of the middle class. Outsourcing. The Iraq War. Note: Afghanistan, I understood. We were going after Osama bin Laden. But the war in Iraq was totally contrived: there were no weapons of mass destruction. A period of calm and progress began with President Obama. Then we abruptly descended into The Upside Down with tRump. He hasn’t gone away so we are still there.

There’s a new presidential election coming next year. Although President Biden has been able to accomplish much in two years despite the constant blocks and obstacles from the Repubs, he remains unpopular. It’s mind-blowing. Still, Biden could win a second term because the Repubs have no one: tRump is running but he’s facing criminal charges and Death Santis just isn’t popular out of the south.

But there is a threat, and that is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I don’t imagine many in the younger generations remember the real RFK, Bobby. Junior has the name and is banking on it, but he is NOT his father.  I am adamantly opposed to him, especially since he announced he is running as a Democrat.

A Democrat! He is nothing like a Democrat, so I will call him a Dino.

Russia attacked Ukraine, and they fought back. We have been supporting Ukraine. Jr. thinks we should look at things from Russia’s point of view. Right. The assailant’s point of view. He says President Biden is a warmonger.

He is an anti-vaxxer. He hangs out with white supremacists and ultra-right-wing conservative types. I don’t see him mingling with us common folk. Fox News, the biggest source of conservative conspiracies and misinformation, interviewed him and they absolutely love him!

Junior thinks that all vaccines are bad for us. He’s bought into the idea that the MMR given to children causes autism. He thought the covid vaccine did terrible things to us. Now measles cases among children are rising because ignorant parents are buying into that kind of misinformation. He also pronounces that more people have died from covid vaccinations than from covid. What a big fat lie that is.

He doesn’t support gun control. He thinks the mass shootings are caused by our pharmaceutical drugs. Oh, really?

He supported the release of the man who shot and killed his father, Sirhan Sirhan! That blew my mind away. How could he do it? From what I’ve read, he thinks Sirhan was framed and that his father was actually killed by a security guard. Um, no. Sirhan admitted to it.

What the hell happened to him that so twisted his thinking? He was about my age, maybe a year older, when his father was murdered. How devastating to lose your father like that. He ran into troubles as a teenager and young adult. I don’t think it’s necessary to talk about that except I wonder if those experiences began messing with his thinking cortex somehow.

I read he was an environmental lawyer, which I think is absolutely awesome and shows he must have some caring in him. Yet now he goes about as if he’s some medical expert.

I wish I could like him based on who his father was. Bobby had such warmth in his eyes when he was speaking and interacting with crowds of supporters. I don’t see that in Junior’s eyes. They look cold to me. He is not his father. He might have been but he’s not, nor will he ever be.

Meanwhile, these are just a few articles I’ve been reading about him. I have many more to read through. I may write again about his anti-vaccine misinformation and the harm it’s causing.

Don’t vote for this guy. There's so many red flags. Let's not screw this up again.

Media Matters

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Popular Information’s Elite Obsession and Fox News Favorite

Robert Reich