"Let Freedumb Ring"

Just another holiday down here in the lower 48 and the sounds of celebration have now subsided somewhat. However I understand our Department of Defense is planning their own special fireworks display which will make all the others seem tame and insignificant. Maybe we should just put away the flags long enough to take a close look at what our nation is describing as freedom.

Who knows, maybe one day this holiday will be renamed Expansion Day. It just seems to better portray the direction our nation has taken through the years since the other totalitarian's asses were kicked and independence from England was proclaimed.

Times like this we should reflect on our history and the lessons it teaches. What did the slaves think about Independence Day? In the words of Frederick Douglas from his Independence Day Speech.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.

What did the original inhabitants of this land think about Independence Day? Well, from the beginning, it didn't matter whose side the tribes supported during the Revolutionary War. They were doomed to suffer near extinction from either side! Both were filled with insatiable wants and expansion was their God given right!

And I wonder what our immigrants think of Independence Day? Hell, I bet they're out in the streets celebrating the freedom that comes from independence. And they're probably wishing the construction of the border fences and walls would begin so some jobs would open up and they could buy some groceries. Yeah, I can hear them singing praises now...can you hear them? I can just hear the last stanza: "Let Freedom Ring"!

Let's look at this holiday in reflection and not forget the past national atrocities, and let us keep a constant vigil so we don't suffer future atrocities to the people of this earth!