This Independence Day, I don a red face mask/bandana, white gym shorts, and a blue T-shirt. As well as some black kui kui beads which my daughter brought back from Hawaii, and some A+D ointment to help my new tattoo heal (it's a hopefully-subtle-enough appropriation of symbols from Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and Hopi cultures). In the next room, there is a singer from Colombia on the speaker, porque aprendiendo espanol y me gusta Shakira. My youngest listens attentively in her Belle dress (from a beautiful American movie which borrowed the quaintest and most picaresque stereotypes from French culture).
I wonder if we (I'm not sure who I mean when I say we....) are beginning (just beginning mind you) to feel the sins of our ancestors. As we attempt to celebrate during this outbreak of a virus which many of us empathize with more and more... Stockholm Syndrome or something else? 'Celebrate' while distanced from each other. 'Celebrate' a nation which apparently is now taking its paranoid obsession with dominating the world into space. And also independence... For that select group, who felt that their taxes were too high, felt they were being oppressed. While some of them grew wealthier through the work of the human beings they enslaved. While some began the genocide of a whole continent's worth of diverse human societies/families/beings. To say nothing of other species... "So get out!" I can hear the comment section screaming, (if I were popular enough to get comments). To which I guess this hypothetically-popular version of myself would respond, 'it's my country too, whether I worship it or not.'
Not that this is the beginning of a sentence meted out by some cosmic court decision to balance the scales (as if we could balance these weighty scales). But maybe the beginning of a very natural reaping of the seeds which we started planting along with foreign flags and delusions of 'manifest destiny'. Seeds which we continue to scatter... I wonder what else we will reap, beyond earthquakes, a warming world, a destroying angel virus, guilt, and this driftting, cultureless, homeless feeling that pervades, even in the town where I've always lived, in the home I share with a family I love.
And now that I write that down, all together with this critical tone, and disregarding the multi-faceted and infinitely complex nature of history as well as of each individual being, it does sound a bit like we (I don't know who I mean when I say 'we') are systematically creating that biblical Hell. Maybe the only way we know to make amends? Maybe we're simultaneously working all 12 steps and we will accept that we have a problem and that our lives have become unmanageable (step 1) at the same time that we plunge into that lake of fire, both making amends (step 9), and (step 12) passing along what we have learned to our descendants (I imagine they will have been sent to live in the ISS, or wherever Elon Musk is dwelling at that point).
If existence is an organism, have 'we' become a limb, gangrenous beyond help, or is this a growing pain in our prepubescent shin (band name idea: prepubescent shin)?
