"Independence" Day?
Surely You're Joking
Today, the dominant narrative says it’s time to celebrate “American Independence.”
Actually, it’s a time to remember that once upon a time a cadre of privileged white men formalized their intention to install a system of new bosses to replace the old bosses. To throw off the fetters that constrained profits, to cement a new system to perpetuate the centuries old exploitation of a virgin continent without cost, interference, or consequence. To displace distant despots in favor of local decision-making on how best to dispossess the remaining original inhabitants and appropriate their resources most efficiently.
What freedom did this bold new mercantile charter of 1776 engender? Consider:
We aren’t free from plastic oceans
We aren’t free from burning forests
We aren’t free from 12 lane freeways
We aren’t free from 20 acre parking lots
We aren't free from 115 degree afternoons
We aren’t free from the $700 billion Pentagon budget
We aren’t free from toxins in our food and water
We aren’t free from the decimation of species and habitat
We aren’t free from the fear our children will be slaughtered at school
We aren’t free from a voracious runaway system the degrades everything it touches
The mighty corporations that would sell us the wonders of modern living as improvements and remedies perpetuate a myth that humanity is on a trajectory of prosperity. “Fewer people live in poverty now than ever before.”
Wrong.
Fewer people lived with poverty, misery, and disease on these Western continents before the invasion. When you read about how industrialized modernity has made such progress against diseases - for example, malaria - consider:
Diseases such as treponemiasis and tuberculosis were already present in the New World, along with diseases such as tularemia, giardia, rabies, amebic dysentery, hepatitis, herpes, pertussis, and poliomyelitis, although the prevalence of almost all of these was probably low in any given group.
Old World diseases that were not present in the Americas until contact include bubonic plague, measles, smallpox, mumps, chickenpox, influenza, cholera, diphtheria, typhus, malaria, leprosy, and yellow fever.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071659
The extraction-consumption complex is now talking about training AI to recognize different types of garbage so it can be recycled. We are generating so much crap that we can’t keep up with trying to reuse it. Incessant mechanized extraction of resources from our host planet generates waste material at such a rate that disposal requires other mechanized processes, developed at tremendous expense, consuming even more resources to figure out what to do with it.
What reference on sociology or anthropology might a passage like this come from?
“Rather than responding appropriately to the signals that control normal…behavior, [populations] grow … in an uncontrolled manner, invading…and eventually spreading throughout.
The generalized loss of growth control… is the net result of accumulated abnormalities...and is reflected in several aspects of … behavior that [are] distinguish[ed] …. from…normal counterparts
Nope.
It’s paraphrased from The Development and Causes of Cancer
Freedom and independence? Yes, Spanish conquerors indeed gave the indigenous population the freedom to choose: “Submit or die.”
Here’s how I choose, trying to stay free:
I take this time to meditate on how I came to be here in this blessed part of the world near the mountains and ocean, which is to say, at the expense of the Esselen and Ohlone and other tribes who used to live here. I look inward for ways I can play some small part to undo some of the damage that’s been done and continues to be done. I consume less, think more, and give. I try, every day, to be at least in some small measure an immune response to cancerous enslavement.
Egalitarian principles eventually embodied in the Constitution were purloined from First Nations culture. “Settlers” who truly connected with indigenous communities often abandoned the madness of the invaders’ way of life and discovered a truly new world of sharing, community, abundance, harmony with nature and health. They never went back. I wish I could join them.
Finally, for those who are exercising freedom not by submitting, but by engaging in criminal acts such as seeking reproductive rights or acting to foster environmental justice, you may be interested in my post on staying safe and secure.