Independence Day?

     For 237 years, we've been pretending we're the freest nation on earth and predicating our unique arrogance (that finds its most obnoxious expression in the state of Texas) on this seriously misguided conception. Redneck states pretend they're still independent from the Union and fly their piss yellow Gadsden and Confederate flags, the rest of us trot out our faded and tattered Old Glories in the breeze between June 14th and July 4th and leave them to flutter like a heart afflicted with PVC's.
     Then we kill brain cells by drinking barrels and kegs of beer, shoving dead, barbecued animal parts in our mouths and pride ourselves on our freedoms and paying no attention whatsoever to the fact that the last two administrations, especially the current one, has been systematically stripping inalienable rights from us like a horny date on prom night and replacing them with conditional privileges that have to be earned. We've been roofied, plain and simple, and our stubborn sense of denial is literally the only thing keeping this country from turning into Brazil or Egypt. Which, now that I think about it, wouldn't be such a bad fucking thing.
     It is the delusion we're still the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave as our jingoistic national songs keep piously telling us even as Barack Obama and your Congress made it illegal for you to exercise your First Amendment rights by protesting near a federal building or anyone within a parsec who may have Secret Service protection. We have drones flying over our streets in some James Cameron nightmare-come-true listening in on us as is the NSA through the patriotic efforts of Yahoo, Google, Microsoft,. Skype, Facebook and every other internet behemoth on the planet earth.
     We keep telling ourselves we've moved beyond slavery and indentured servitude even as the kids who'd voted for Obama five years ago have since graduated from college and found out the job promised them on earning their sheepskin was farmed out through one "trade agreement" or another to some guy working in a dark, crowded office with other brown people making a small fraction of what you were promised. We keep telling ourselves slavery was abolished with the 13th amendment in 1865 even as we continue to aid and abet corporate slavery and the sweatshops they maintain that get people killed by buying crap we used to make in this country. And those kids just getting out of college have gotten out only to find themselves $80,000 in debt for the next several decades of their lives and no realistic way to pay it off because federal loans were pushed on them and their parents four years ago while their Pell grants were put in the crosshairs of the Republicans.
     We keep telling ourselves, "You've come a long way, baby!" even as Texas and other Republican-dominated states put women's basic rights under fire all in the name of decency and pretending this is what their constituents want and violate parliamentary law to pass these misogynistic measures.
     We keep telling ourselves we all have the right to say, write, think and feel whatever we want, which technically is true but while our smiling fascist president keeps telling us, "Oh, no, we're not spying on your phone calls, your email, your internet travels and your snail mail", let me make one thing perfectly clear: You still have freedom of speech but be prepared to reap the whirlwind because freedom, as our government hastens to remind us, is messy and comes at a price.
     So while you keep telling yourselves that we've successfully maintained the ideals of the Founding Fathers 237 years ago that guaranteed us freedom from a foreign tyranny without once taking into account the domestic kind, while you keep stubbornly repeating those talking points that maintain our sanity as we're frisked and searched at sporting stadiums and airports, as your 4th of July has been completely taken away by townships scared shitless of sparklers and beer, try to remember where Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning are spending their Independence days. Pray for the ETs to finally wake up and come down from on high and set this miserable planet straight.
     Because, left to our own devices, I see absolutely no reversal of these fascist trends that creep up on us and no capacity for the human race outside of Brazil and Egypt to even begin reversing those fascist trends.