We just celebrated this nation’s 250th anniversary. Here in the Centennial State we also celebrated our state’s 150th anniversary.
It was clear I wasn’t the only one not feeling it. Trump’s Great American Fair was a flop, poorly attended, and adorned with the trappings of an autocrat.
Vibes across the country felt more like a wake than an anniversary; more like a funeral dirge and less like an anthem. Maybe it was the apocalyptic red sun haze from the deadly wildfire that still rages to the south, or maybe it was the Colorado River at historic lows, but the people locally weren’t feeling it either.
The Fourth this year certainly didn’t ring with freedom for Grand Junction’s unhoused residents; the amended camping ban went into effect on that grand anniversary. Hooray! What is more American than criminalizing whole segments of the population? Move over, hamburgers and fireworks.
But at least the city council has a sense of history. I mean, how else do you explain their vote to continue 140 years of failed Grand Junction policies that have sought to criminalize poverty?
The city, over its history, has tried everything: chain-gangs, concentration camps, poor farms, state homes, park closures, hostile architecture, mob violence, ordinances, batons, harassment, and jail.
Coincidentally, on the Fourth of July in 1939, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel announced with glee: “Hitler’s Lead is followed by Grand Junction officials. The ‘concentration’ camp where transients are scheduled to be penned in … is shown below.”
The 55% of Mesa County wage earners who can’t afford to rent a place on the free market and are surviving via roommates, living with family, or side hustles, are burned out and broke, and being broke feels anything but free.
We did get to celebrate another Fourth of July at war in the Middle East! That’s familiar, at least.
Yet another foreign war we will not win, but at least we are losing this war quickly and decisively. That’s something to celebrate. I guess.
It was hard to celebrate the birthday of ‘Liberty,’ while the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” people who are our co-workers, neighbors, employees and friends were being hunted by a standing internal army with a budget larger than most militaries.
But now freedom and liberty have become just words – tinsel and glitter used to obscure the deep rot in our body politics. After a 33-year-long tradition of reading the Declaration of Independence on the air, NPR had to scrap the tradition in 2022. In part, it was causing too much confusion. Especially when they tweeted it out in 2017.
Complaints from right-wingers, unfamiliar with the Declaration, felt they were targeting Trump and calling for violence! Liberals confused it for the station challenging or goading Trump and commented their praise, just as unfamiliar with the Declaration.
The Declaration is so often invoked because it holds us to the gold-standard definition of liberty, a mark we have always fallen short of, namely, “that all men are created equal.”
Movements from abolitionists, to suffragettes, from striking union miners, to LGBTQ+ rights activists, have evoked this demand.
The Declaration of Independence was, of course, a demand, and demands must be backed with action.
Every progressive step we have taken towards that gold standard, has been made by organized people with a demand, and the wherewithal to then take action. (Every step backwards, you guessed it, big money.)
That is to say: the pendulum doesn’t swing on its own. Only people and/or money can move it, and even then it’s hard.
The founders knew it.
And the citizens of western Colorado on the Fourth of July, 1894, knew it.
At that time, a nationwide coal strike was being upstaged by a national rail strike, all in the midst of the depression caused by the Panic of 1893.
Around 300 local railroad workers had walked off the job, and a trainload of recently deputized U.S. Marshals were steaming west from Denver to put down the strike in Grand Junction.
The morning of the Fourth, Grand Junction townfolks, business owners, the American Railway Union Local #2, the Populist party, and another dozen local unions held a mass meeting: hatching a plan to resist the federal ‘invasion.’
That same day, striking miners in New Castle demonstrated what solidarity looks like. They, too, knew the train was heading their way, destined ultimately to break the strike in Grand Junction.
First, striking miners attempted to set fire to the bridge over Elk Creek. Then, they tried to steal the train. And when the train finally started towards Grand Junction, they came upon a whole work crew of striking miners pulling spikes on the ‘road.’ Two miners were arrested and thrown on the Marshal’s train bound for Grand Junction.
The trainload of armed Marshals arrived late in the afternoon of the Fourth. U.S. Marshal Joseph A. Small described the situation in a letter to D.C.:
“The conditions of affairs at Grand Junction were [sic] extraordinary, my deputies were met not only by the strikers at that point but by the citizens who met in a public hall prior to their arrival and resolved not only to resist the entry of the deputies to the town, but also to give them no quarters or sell them anything to eat!”
Colorado’s only revolutionary Governor, Davis Waite, was in office at the time, and he knew it, too. Waite, a left-wing populist, told an assembly of organizations in Denver the year before the strikes:
“The war has begun; it is the same war which must always be waged against oppression and tyranny to preserve the liberties of man — that eternal warfare of monarchy and monopoly against the rights of the people.”
Speaking of war, this Fourth, we heard a lot about those who have ‘died for our freedoms.’ But unless they are talking about the Civil War, this is rank propaganda.
The people that have died for our freedoms have bled here, not abroad.
People like Alex Pretti, Renee Good, Heather Heyer, Aaron Bushnell, Fred Hampton, Bobby Hutton, MOVE, Medgar Evers, Los Seis de Boulder, John Brown, Judi Bari, Jimmie Lee Jackson, Joe Hill, the Haymarket Martyrs, John Riley and his St. Patrick’s Battalion, and too many more left out of the history books.
These are the people we should be remembering this Fourth of July. They all died in pursuit of that gold standard of liberty set forth in the Declaration.
Our military veterans fought geopolitical games over resources, ideology, and profits for the oligarchs, whose children always seem to have bone spurs. Don’t trust me. Take it from Major General Smedley Butler, who described his almost 34 year career in the US Marine Corp thusly, in his 1935 pamphlet, “War is a Racket:”
“I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints.”
This Fourth of July it felt more like a question: “Freedom and liberty for whom?”
Not the millions in prison, or who have loved ones on the ‘inside;’ not those skipping meals to pay for gas; not those targeted for dissent as the Homeland Security apparatus reorganizes to target domestic dissent in the wake of NSPM-7.
The people know we continually put another nation’s interest ahead of our own; we know there is one justice for us and another for the Epstein class; we know the rich and corporations own both parties; and we know that there can be no democracy when 1% of the population controls 90% of the wealth.
It just doesn’t feel like the land of liberty while the president pockets over $2 billion in bribes from foreign countries, and pumps and dumps oil futures and crypto to his own market manipulations – all while hundreds of millions of Americans struggle.
What does freedom or liberty even mean, when our local law enforcement agencies continue to install more FLOCK cameras whose AI is tracking all of our movements all of the time?
The founders knew how hard it is for people to find the courage. They spoke to it in the Declaration: “all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves.”
But they also knew that “when a long train of abuses and usurpations … reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”
The founders understood that we have to take action if we want a better world. It’s our duty. Nobody, no leader, no politician, no second coming, no party, no organization is coming to save us. We will have to do this ourselves.
We all need to think about where our red line lies. How long are we going to keep trusting a system that is failing us? How long do we keep passing the buck hoping for a generation braver than ours?
We should all take a moment and contemplate: what level of injustice; what level of ‘despotism’ would move us from inaction and into the history books?
