Earlier this month, when most of the country was celebrating the Fourth of July, I realized this was the first Independence Day in my whole adult life where I hadn’t acknowledged the seriousness and the beauty of the day.
Every year — except this year — I have had the honor of participating in the local televised reading of Frederick Douglass’ famous address, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” If you’ve not heard or read the speech, it is basically an exposé on the hypocrisy of a nation celebrating freedom while enslaving millions of my Black brothers and sisters.
And I don’t use that phrase “my brothers and sisters” lightly.
As a Jewish person, with much of my grandmother’s family murdered in Auschwitz, the current state of our country feels very threatening. If you are Black or brown, then we have one — probably more than one — thing in common.
In his eloquent speech, Douglass said, “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.”
With those brilliant words in mind, somehow the idea of celebrating freedom just now feels like I’m in denial about what’s really going on in my country.
Many of our citizens aren’t free. Even immigrants with citizenship aren’t necessarily free.
And since I grew up with the mantra “Never again” as a Jew, I am afraid it’s sheer hubris of me to take my freedom for granted.
I’ve read book after book, article after article, and listened to many Holocaust survivors coupled — plus last year, I saw the play “Leopoldstadt.” All of this reinforces the fact that I am not paranoid, just hyper-aware.
The play was about a small town in Austria where an assimilated Jewish family begins hearing about the atrocities outside their safe and secure womb and are suddenly conscious of how tentative their existence is.
For years I have had visions (not that kept me up at night, but still visions) of the Gestapo banging on the door of our little cabin, giving us 10 minutes to gather our belongings and telling us this isn’t our home anymore.
How could what happened with the death camps and the cruelty of man’s inhumanity to man be a catalyst for a Hitler to emerge?
The ingredients were all there: a charismatic leader, rampant inflation, unemployment at 30 percent, recovering from the devastation of World War I, and the strategic political maneuvering by conservative elites who mistakenly believed they could control Hitler.
Too close for comfort. My comfort anyway.
Add to the mix Christian Nationalism. Christian Nationalism is not on the horizon. It’s here. Texas passed recent legislation (Texas Bill 10) to require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in classrooms, and they have instituted mandatory Bible story readings.
In Douglass’ speech, he never puts down the men who had the courage to break with their oppressors. At one point he says, “They loved their country more than their own private interests.”
Wish I could say the same for our leaders.
I have to remember we’re just a big spoiled toddler having tantrums. China is 5,000 years old. Rome is almost 3,000 years old. And we’re 250 years old.
Hopefully next year we’ll have grown up a little, and I’ll be able to celebrate like I used to.