And I by no means ought to have been.
Yearly on July 4, to a lot fanfare and revelry, the USA marks its 1776 independence from Britain.
The date can be an official vacation in Puerto Rico and different de facto US colonies. A lot for “independence”.
I used to be born within the US in 1982, and, earlier than definitively liberating myself from the “land of the free” in 2003, bought to expertise many a Fourth of July celebration. One 12 months, once I was 12 or 13 and residing within the Texas capital of Austin, my household and I attended a large Independence Day gathering by the river, full with deafening music and fireworks that completely traumatised our canine Bounder.
Though this was greater than 25 years in the past, I can nonetheless recall being disproportionately moved by the Lee Greenwood track, God Bless the USA – a staple of July 4th festivities – at the same time as Bounder convulsed beside me.
The track’s chorus begins: “And I’m proud to be an American, the place not less than I do know I’m free” – and, certainly, as I stood there surrounded by my fellow Individuals in a metropolis named for a coloniser and slaveowner, I felt my coronary heart swell with satisfaction on the considered this inexplicable freedom that, in accordance with the tune, we by some means collectively loved.
Anyway, that’s just about how low-cost patriotism works.
In her acclaimed e book Notes on a Overseas Nation, journalist Suzy Hansen by the way cites this exact same Lee Greenwood anthem, which she and her classmates sang at some point on the college bus in New Jersey through the US invasion of Iraq in 1990 – to not be confused with the 2003 US invasion of Iraq or the apocalyptic US sanctions that, as late American diplomat Madeleine Albright admitted, had killed some half 1,000,000 Iraqi kids as of 1996.
Hansen was 13 on the time, and remembers “changing into teary-eyed” on the bus as she “remembered the MTV video of the track” whereas singing it – with the recollection of visible stimuli after all solely including to the patriotic sensationalism of the second. And since we Individuals “not less than” knew that we have been “free”, Hansen writes, this meant that “everybody else was a chump, as a result of they didn’t even have that apparent factor – no matter it was, it didn’t matter, it was the factor that we had, and nobody else did, and we have been proud and particular”.
To make sure, Iraq is much from the one place on Earth that has lengthy needed to endure the lethal repercussions of self-righteous American entitlement and ignorant nationalist fervour. As Mark Twain reportedly stated: “God created battle in order that Individuals would be taught geography.”
Granted, the geographical lesson could not have gone in accordance with divine plan, nevertheless it presumably issues little to the arms business whether or not or not the overall US inhabitants can find on a map the international locations the US is bombing or in any other case terrorising. In the meantime, it actually helps the imperial picture when the US army slaughter of civilians overseas can – as in Iraq – be forged as a noble effort to unfold that “particular” freedom that we Individuals “not less than” know we possess.
However simply how “free” are Individuals, on the finish of the day? Even because the nation manages to spend trillions upon trillions of dollars on bellicose endeavours, Individuals themselves are disadvantaged of such primary rights as inexpensive healthcare, training and housing. Homelessness is a veritable epidemic within the US – and has reached a stage not seen in drastically poorer international locations.
In April, the New York Instances quoted San Francisco emergency room physician Maria Raven on the latest dreadful uptick in homeless deaths in America: “It’s like a wartime dying toll in locations the place there isn't any battle.”
Then once more, perhaps there may be actually a battle – and one which America is waging by itself folks.
Not solely are Individuals decidedly not “free” from poverty or homelessness, however the US additionally boasts the best incarceration price on this planet – an association that has historically stuffed the coffers of the personal jail business to the detriment of, effectively, society.
And following the June 24 Supreme Court docket ruling on abortion, girls within the US can dispense with any phantasm of freedom of management over their very own our bodies – particularly poor girls of color, who shouldn't have the relative socioeconomic freedom to pursue alternate choices that override the reproductive fascism of the state.
Nor are kids within the US free to go to high school with out having to fret about being mown down by a semi-automatic weapon or different deadly machine. Recall the case of 11-year-old Miah Cerrillo, a survivor of the Could 24 bloodbath of 19 college students and two lecturers at Robb Elementary College in Uvalde, Texas. As CNN reported, Cerrillo “feared the gunman would come again for her so she smeared herself in her good friend’s blood and performed lifeless”.
I dare say that's not what freedom appears like.
This Fourth of July, I'm not “proud to be an American” – and I by no means ought to have been.
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