Notes Ahead Of A Discouraging Independence Day

a photo of the declaration of independence — image via Wikimedia Commons

So, here we are.

It’s been an incredibly frustrating several days, if you follow political news in any way.

Tomorrow is Independence Day, and I’m not exactly looking forward to it.

I am incredibly discouraged.

Truthfully I am feeling a little gaslit, because I know what I saw on Debate Night. You can verify that I’m telling the truth, because I live tweeted all my impressions of the debate as they happened. I honestly didn’t see that Biden had dementia. I saw an exhausted old man who’d lost control of his stutter. I saw that he had a cold. I was deeply worried and disappointed. But after a few serious flubs at the beginning, he hit his stride and started answering questions correctly. He rasped his way through. I wanted to give him a cough drop and some Throat Coat tea. I didn’t think he was struggling with his memory or cognition. Meanwhile, his opponent let out a 90-minute stream of consciousness that was nothing but lies and nonsense. And Biden made confused faces and played with his pen. That was awful. But I don’t think the president is cognitively impaired.

The instant the debate was over, the media started running with the narrative that Biden was a vegetable.

And everyone took their queues from the media and started telling me that Biden was a vegetable. And I was overwhelmed and started to wonder if he was myself. But I think I’m thinking more clearly now.

It’s not hard to see why the legacy media would run with the story like that. They have a vested interest in making this race into a horse race. They’re used to covering presidential races like a horse race. And Trump is great for clicks and newspaper subscriptions; that’s what narcissistic sociopaths do. So we get article after article obsessing over Biden’s cognitive ability. We get demands that the Democratic party scrap him as a candidate. We don’t get nearly so many demands that the Republican party scrap their adjudicated sex abuser candidate, who can’t even leave the country to visit his own golf course in Scotland right now due to a felony conviction stemming from dalliances with a porn star who was traumatized by the experience. We don’t get nearly as many warnings about Project 2025 and televised show trials and the fact that the Supreme Court is monumentally corrupt. There have been some. But many outlets, particularly the New York Times, want to stick with the narrative that Biden is a vegetable, because it’s profitable. You can’t create nearly so much controversy if you report that a convicted felon is going up against an exhausted old man with a bad cold. So you pretend it’s a race between two equally bad choices, and then you gleefully hype the bad cold.

I will do whatever it takes to avoid Project 2025 and a dictatorship. If the Democratic party decides that it’s in their best interest to retire Biden and name another candidate, I’ll vote for them. I didn’t like Biden very much in 2020 and I’ll be glad to vote for somebody else in 2024. I’ll vote for anyone including an actual vegetable. Find me a thirty-five-year-old natural born radish, and I’ll vote for it. Not because the Democrats are exceptionally good; they’re often not at all. Not because the Republicans are always bad– I’ve voted Republican before. I still like Mitt Romney pretty well. But because a certain fringe group has completely taken over the Republican party at the moment, they are very public about destroying our democracy and establishing themselves as a dictatorship, and that is something I cannot tolerate.

I am an American.

Tomorrow is Independence Day, my country’s birthday.

My country is not a perfect or even a very good country, a lot of the time. We’ve committed atrocities, more than once, and we don’t own up to that as we ought. We were founded by fascinating, tenacious, intelligent men who also horrifically enslaved their fellow human beings, and that can’t be forgotten or excused. We’re the only country in the world to have dropped a nuclear bomb on a civilian city, and we did it twice. We massacred Indigenous people. We’ve put our own citizens in internment camps. None of that is laudable. All of that is despicable. But I admire what America claims to stand for. I admire us, whenever we get it right. I admire every American who has dared to suggest that the words “we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal” applies to them, even when the rest of America insists that they don’t apply. The Declaration of Independence was written by an enslaver and a rapist. But as long as there has been an America, there have been wonderful Americans who fought to make those words true anyway. True for Black people and for immigrants, true for Indigenous people, true for women and LGBTQ people. I want to be one of the people who keep fighting to make those words apply to all of us.

I don’t believe that the way forward to a better America is to give up what vestiges of democracy we have left. I believe the best way is to hold onto the bit of good we have and build from there.

If you read this blog often, you know I long ago refused to be gaslit by the Catholic media who often claim there’s some kind of moral obligation to always vote for the candidate that has “R” by his name instead of “D.” That’s nonsense. We’re allowed to vote according to our informed conscience. We’re allowed to vote to reduce the evil in the world the best way we know how. And that’s especially true now that we know for fact that the pro-life movement’s plan made everything worse. Abortion rates have been going up ever since Trump’s election and they went up even further in 2023. The Dobbs decision didn’t fix it. Dobbs made it worse. Babies are dying because of the world the pro-life movement helped create. I’m never going to help them again. They stand for nothing.

And I refuse to be gaslit by the legacy media that desperately wants to sabotage any chance we have so they can make a buck.

I also refuse to be gaslit by pundits and professional commentators who’ve decided we’re already lost. They want to make a splash by telling a story. I’m not done fighting yet.