Fourth of July: Not for Me

(Letter)

5 July 2018

Dear WV,

This year’s Fourth of July festivities in Chicago were rudely interrupted by a long and intense downpour of rain. The crowd that had come out to watch the fireworks was multi-racial, but a large percentage of the celebrants were white suburban families. I wondered if the cold shower had woken any of them up to the day-to-day horrors of life in black America, where dilapidated housing, lead-infused water, lack of access to adequate nutrition or a quality public education, police brutality and mass incarceration are mundane, inescapable realities. Probably not.

Anyone celebrating America’s birthday ought to take with them the whole package: a nation whose military murders innocent people all over the world, whose government would rather imprison black and Latino youth than fund schools, and whose elected officials unapologetically push their relentless campaign of racist, anti-immigrant xenophobia. I see no cause for rejoice.

I did not partake in the festivities, but I could hear the fireworks from inside my apartment. The explosions sounded like echoes from the first, bourgeois American Revolution, echoes which resounded in the American Civil War to smash the slave system. I know that those echoes will return a third time to finish what the Civil War started, to overthrow racist American capitalism and sweep the brutal oppression and exploitation of this rotten system into the dustbin of history. That will be something to celebrate.

Yours,
R.S.