And your last sentence is the key here. There is ALWAYS someone out there saying “don’t celebrate” Holiday X or Anniversary Y because of some historical/political/social injustice.
Now, as the date approaches, due to the nature of Social Media, the very notion that it was mentioned at all by someone, will become itself its own Thing Worth Mentioning, and in the repeating and relaying before you know it there will be out there an established Myth that this DID happen, complete with fabricated reports of public acts of disloyalty. Oy, humanity sucks.
I’m the descendant of both slaves and slave masters.
You will never see my ass at a Confederate pride rally, though.
To be more on topic, you will never see me waving a flag at the 4th of July parade. You’re more likely to see me doing this at a Juneteeth celebration. Only people who don’t view history through a compassionate lens would be confused as to why.
I consider myself sufficiently patriotic in that I pay my taxes, obey laws, perform my civic duties, and don’t collude with foreign governments. Patrioticism isn’t what people do on a single day of the year. It’s what people do every day, when no one is watching.
I’m sure there’s a lot of them who identify more with their Spanish ancestry than their indigenous or African ancestry, even when visibly they resemble the latter more than the former.
I used to work with some Cuban Americans. They identified as white and totally saw themselves as “unadulterated” European descendants. They were also some of the most unapologetically racist folks I’ve ever encountered. Always talking shit about those “Mexicans”. But I digress…
I don’t think the majority of Hispanic people are like this, though. That said, my experiences have been limited.
It probably wouldn’t fly, but June 19th should be a national holiday. I was thinking that this year when someone asked me what Juneteenth was. I knew it had something to do with the end of slavery, but I didn’t know exactly what until I looked it up. And if you had asked me the day before the 19th of June what day Juneteenth was referring to, I would have said “Not sure, but I think it’s June 13”.
We have lots of patriotic teenagers in this country.
What I was referring to is the systematic suppression of Hispanic votes.
In presidential elections, states with more exclusively white populations such as North Dakota tend to have more powerful votes than states with higher Hispanic populations such as California. In the case of North Dakota and California in particular, North Dakotans get 3.6 times the vote that Californians do.
Republicans exploit gerrymandering much more than Democrats do, and their use of it tries to counter the growing population of Hispanic citizens (among other things).
There is also a great deal of fear mongering around the polling process, for example with vague threats of deportation or challenge to citizenship status, that can even deter citizens.
The ability of Hispanic people who are nonwhite to become citizens is under increased challenge lately, with the President frequently saying racist things and asking for immigrants from very white countries.
Hispanic people also get all kinds of additional challenges, such as police profiling, that white people don’t have to deal with. All this stuff figures into how efficiently and effectively people get to say what they think, request what they want, and generally participate in steering our country. Hispanic people do get some control, of course, but they don’t get much of a vote or say relative to what white people are accustomed to.
I think that’s pretty interesting and frankly, cool. I don’t think a lot of Christians share this view, though. I’m guessing that quite a few churches will be doing something patriotic this Wednesday. Once, my aunt dragged me and my family to a 4th of July church service and I’ll never forget how over-the-top “MURICA!!” it was. I’ve never experienced anything like that before and I hope to never ever again.
It’s weird, though, given how straightforward the logic is. Christians often say that we’re “in the world, but not of it,” which is a pretty straightforward distillation of any number of Scriptures. But if you’re in the world, but not of it, then it pretty much directly follows that you’re in [whatever subdivision of the world you happen to be a part of], but not of it as well.
But despite the simple logic above, a religion that kept things like national loyalties at arms’ length would be nearly so marketable. People want a God who tells them that maybe they’re sinning in little ways, like cutting someone off in traffic, but other than trivial sins like that, they’re right about pretty much everything. So if they’re the flag-waving sort, they want a God that waves their flag just as zealously as they do.
I think most Americans celebrate the holiday without even thinking of what it means. I know I generally do, when I celebrate it. Heck, I wasn’t even thinking about that way back when in 1976 going to the bicentennial celebration at the Hatch Shell in Boston. That was some serious fun, though! We were there for the music (Boston Pops) and the fireworks.
I agree. I think people celebrate the 4th because it’s fun to celebrate stuff. Parades and BBQs are fun. Fireworks are cool and evoke feelings of nostalgia. All of it does. I could see how someone would feel like everything is so weighed down by politics and seriousness, so it’s nice to just see the 4th as just the 4th. Everyone’s got a birthday, so why not the country?
But it’s not just a birthday for a lot of people. And for lots of people, the day is laden with politics, not a day off from them.
I “celebrate” or don’t as the spirit moves me (or, more accurately, as I get an invite to someone else’s cook-out or not).
The suggestion that anyone should care whether or not their neighbor buys made-in-China bunting and cooks hot dogs outside on a proscribed day is baffling. The idea that the presumed race of that neighbor makes their choice more sinister is laughable.
