For the occasion of the Fourth of July, I hope all of you are all doing well and staying healthy. The Fourth of July is a weird feeling for me, one hand, my partents came to this country in search of a better life and opportunity which from their hard work, certainly established themselves. Being born at the beginning of the 90s, life was quite good for me as a pup, never knew much in the way of hardship. But with 9/11 that I barely understood at 10, to when I graduated high school in 2009, I have read a fair bit since then and the image of the US in my head began to change. Year by year there was hope we might get over a lot of the blatant problems we have but now it's all laid bare with all the recent developments. From my readings of history, the US was often depicted as a city on a hill, a place of freedom and prosperity but scratching the surface, it's mainly an image.

The US was a place of freedom yes...for mainly white men for nearly 200 years. The phrase often put forth by the founding fathers "all men are created equal" well...those words were hollow for the first 100 years of the US' existence with the contradiction of tolerating slavery, which didn't go unnoticed at that time, an abolitionist at the time named Thomas Day wrote in 1776:
"If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independency with the one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves."
This problem was the original sin that went with the founding of the US, and it took a very destructive civil war that killed more Americans than any other war America was involved in combined. Even after emancipating slaves, they would have second class status for another century before it took massive protests, and political pressure to end the Jim Crow laws. But just before the civil war, Frederick Douglas, born a slave and upon gaining his freedom became one of the foremost African American figures in American history. And his speech "What to the slave is the Fourth of July?" is a must hear, and the echoes of its critique of the United States can still be relevant today.

I think to believe in this country is to believe we can do better, we can overcome what MLK calls the three ills of our nation: poverty, racism and militarism, we must change for the better and overcome these illnesses or else all men are created equal will be just an empty phrase, we certainly are doing better than we did decades ago but we have a long way to go, and we must keep pushing forward and bettering ourselves as a nation.
Anyway, here's Frederick Douglas' Fourth of July speech, voiced by James Earl Jones.