Yesterday marked the 245th anniversary of the publication of the Declaration of Independence. In the past I’ve written about the beauty of that document, which I’ve tried to hold on to during the past five years. I knew it was under assault beginning with the 2016 election, and in the first year of Cadet Bonespurs’ reign, the structure of the world he and his ilk wanted to build became clear when his end of the Twitterverse responded with ridiculous outrage to NPR tweeting the Declaration (as it does every year).
It turns out to be not at all surprising that pig-ignorant goobers
who’ll have no truck with the notion that all men are created equal would storm
the Capitol to overturn an election less than four years later.
The Founding Fathers have taken some hits in recent times—and not
just from the would-be dictator and his white supremacist cult. The fact that race-based
slavery was embedded in the Constitution because a goodly number of the
Founders couldn’t imagine an economy not based on human chattel slavery has
made it out of the academic halls and into the mainstream press. That’s proving
to be as enraging to both ends of the political spectrum—those who mourn its
loss while simultaneously denying it, and those who want white folks to
acknowledge that the foundation of this country rests on the blood of their ancestors.
We have still so far to go to achieve the promise of the Declaration.
But on this Gratitude Monday, I’m thankful that we survived the
past five years, even as we are still under the assault of both home-grown and
foreign anti-democracy elements. After generations of small town parades and community barbecues with fireworks, we've been treated to militaristic willie waving and bloviating at Mount Rushmore. That was hard to take. But there are still more than 81 million of us who
want to see this bold experiment succeed. That’s worth a day of gratitude.
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