Celebration Doesn’t Mean the Work Is Done

Independence demands daily citizenship.

In our family, the 4th of July has always been a big deal. My paternal grandmother, Wilter, was born on July 5th and her mother, my great-grandmother MoMo, was born on July 3rd. MoMo and my grandparents lived side by side, and MoMo’s second daughter, Vermel, lived next door. The eldest, Jeanette, lived a street away - her small rebellion.

They were all modest homes, owned by working class cooks and charwomen, clustered close enough to create a family gathering spot. So, on July 4th every year, my grandparents, and parents, aunts, uncles, cousins and family friends would gather in the shared yard on Westside Avenue. As grills churned out barbeque and ice melted beneath a blistering Mississippi sun, we celebrated three birthdays: theirs and America.

My grandfather, Walter, had served in the Navy and the Army - a volunteer for WWII and a conscript in the Korean War. My uncles Terry and Jerry had both enlisted, and while my dad was drafted for Vietnam, knee injuries disqualified him. Instead, as he put it, he enlisted in the civil rights movement, as did their sisters and - long before they knew each other - as did my mother.

On the 4th, we celebrated a nation of contradiction, complication and promise. A country that made their dreams of homeownership possible, despite 246 years of slavery and nearly 100 years of Jim Crow. We wore the red, white and blue and exploded fireworks in honor of an independence that has never been fully realized. Then we returned to lives of protest, civic engagement and education, pushing for more. Because that’s what patriotism demands.

Because our independence is a practice.

It is the work of building a country where rights are more than language. Where freedom is not dependent on your zip code, your paycheck, your race, your gender, your disability, your immigration status or whether someone in power believes you are worth protecting. My family has long been to me a living testament to the obligations of citizenship, especially in holding our nation to its highest aspirations.

Photo by Tania Benson on Unsplash

The Declaration of Independence gave us words that generations have used to demand more from this nation than its founders were willing to give. Those words were written in a country that allowed slavery. Truths invoked by Black Americans and Native Americans denied citizenship, by women denied equity, by workers denied dignity, by immigrants denied welcome, by disabled people denied access, by queer and trans people denied safety, and by communities told to wait for rights that should never have been withheld.

America’s promises have never enforced themselves. They have become more real when people made them so. That is the part of Independence Day we should remember most clearly.

Right now, people in power want us to mistake performance for patriotism. They want to claim the symbols of the country while violating the substance of its promise. And they paint anyone who stands up to them as unpatriotic, as someone who hates their country.

So we must show how much we love America by demanding more from it.

Too often, we talk about freedom as though it is only the absence of restraint. But freedom also requires the ability to use it.

A person is not fully free if they have the right to vote but no safe way to cast a ballot. A worker is not fully free if one medical bill can unravel a family. A mother is not fully free if the government controls her body but refuses to support her child. A disabled person is not fully free if the paperwork meant to deliver help is designed to deny it. A student is not fully free if the truth of our history is treated as contraband.

Freedom must be usable.

This is the standard. Not whether a right exists on paper, but whether a person can rely on them. As the Supreme Court and the presidency and Congress erode and strip away rights on a daily basis, our freedoms vanish. When administrative sleights of hand can erase liberty by making its reality harder, riskier or more costly to exercise, independence is a cruel mirage. The Bill of Rights may still exist, but its promises are meaningless if protestors are too afraid to gather, if voters are too burdened to cast a ballot, if teachers are forbidden to tell the truth, if families are watched, threatened or disappeared by the state.

Authoritarianism rarely arrives by abolishing rights. Instead, it does its best, most resilient work by turning rights into decorations. By leaving the words in place while draining them of power in people’s actual lives.

Authoritarianism also advances through exhaustion, confusion and repetition. It asks people to stop paying attention. It asks them to believe that nothing they do matters. It asks them to accept cruelty as normal, corruption as inevitable and participation as pointless.

We cannot measure freedom only by what is written. We must measure it by what is possible. We must defend it by what we demand.

Our answer must be daily citizenship.

What I learned as a kid, weaving between knots of adults who swapped stories of rights denied or remembrances of civil rights protests that worked was the act of citizenship. They taught me about doing the work that rarely gets applause but always matters. Because they’d lived the before and the after, which is fast becoming real again.

So what do we do? Check our voter registration and remind friends to do the same. Know who represents us in city hall, the state legislature and Congress. Pay attention to courts and show up for jury duty. Support local journalism. Teach children the full history of this country, not the fragments that flatter power. Show up for those targeted first, because authoritarianism always tests its tools on the people it believes others will abandon.

Photo by Courtney Hedger on Unsplash

This Fourth of July, we do not need to perform patriotism. We need to practice democracy.

We can celebrate and still be honest. We can gather with family and actively remember those excluded from the promise. We can love this country enough to refuse lies about it. We can honor those who fought for freedom by refusing to let freedom become decorative.

Independence is not a feeling. It is practiced when we demand that rights be real, that freedom be usable and that America live up to the promise generations before us fought to make real.

And every day, we must be determined to make it real.