Independence Day - here on the West coast it's a day of over-eating, sport, over drinking, car sales taxes beefing up impoverished city coffers, idiots lobbing illegal fireworks out into the streets, and a general forgetfulness of why exactly this day has been set aside for such merriment.
I don't like the Fourth - my dog Calvin shudders and pees in his pants at every boom, luckily Oscar and Roxy are deaf and Frank and Roo think it's fun to watch Calvin suffer. Kids, What can you do. Can't put them in the blender, right?
My fave passage from the old Declaration is this one - ".... all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government...
I think it's clear that we are willing to be slow boiled like a lobster, barely noticing the erosion of our civil liberties and our social conscience. I often wonder how it happened that the country that nurtured Goethe, Fontane, JS Bach, Kleist etc could so readily be goose-stepped into violent rage against its' own citizenry. And from there into a state of such mind-numbing denial, that when the concentration camps were rising in the countryside, the question was not 'how can we be building such things?' but 'why build such a thing here, near us, in the gorgeous german landscape?'.
Independence and freedom - not the same thing.
This brings me to what I think about on the 4th of July - and most other days. There is a poem written by an inmate of one of the Holocaust's death camps 'The Song Of Buchenwald'.
Written in German it has a haunting sweetness - Buchenwald , like many concentration camps was built near forests and countryside of stunning beauty. The verses speak of the horror of the camps. The chorus goes like this:
O Buchenwald, ich kann dich nicht vergessen
O Buchenwald, I cannot forget you
weil du mein Schicksal bist.
Because you are my destiny
Wer dich verliess, der kann es erst ermessen,
Those who leave you, can only then appreciate
wie wundervoll die Freiheit ist!
how wonderful freedom is
O Buchenwald, wir jammern nicht und klagen
O Buchenwald, we will not whine or complain
und was auch unser Schicksal sei,
and whatever our fate may be
wir wollen trotzdem 'ja' zum Legen sagen,
we will still say 'yes' to life
denn einmal kommt der Tag: dann sind wir frei.
because the day will come: and we will be free
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