So today is July 4th Independence Day for the Good Ole USA, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave ..This is the beloved place where we have written before the statue of Liberty..
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
This is the land where in spite of this eloquent, compassionate writing we have ugly, racist Americans who stand on US freeways blocking the paths of frightened desperate children and women who have traveled thousands of miles fleeing, rape, violence and extreme poverty.. They stand there on stolen land sneering at the ‘huddled masses’ and say not in my backyard, go back home , leave you are not welcome..and chant USA USA USA in a pejorative way.’
The biggest irony is seeing women behave this way when it was less then a century ago, they had no rights and were considered property to the men they married and were forced to bare children for. It’s ironic to see people of darker hues, who were beaten, hung and discriminated against and in the case of African Americans not even considered human when Independence Day first came around..
Today on Independence Day, we should celebrate by reading and listening to a rendition of Frederick Douglass speech.. Douglass a former slave who got freed and became a leading abolitionist pressured President Lincoln to do the right thing around the issue of slavery.. Peep James Earl Jones reading Douglass’s words, reflect and be free..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tTkHJWxfP0
I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.-The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me.
The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct.
And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!
You can and should read the full text to the speech here http://bit.ly/1j2UkSm
Contrast Douglass’s speech with continued racism of USA citizens celebrating Independence Day
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZJj3JdVzuo