RIP Independence Day

I don't post much here because there isn't really much to say.

Two years ago, I had some hints of hope that my sick-in-the-gut feelings of 2016, that my country (at least, the country as I had grown up understanding it to be, a land where progress was occurring and justice was achievable and we were actually moving forward to a better future) had suffered a fatal blow, might have been premature.

More recently, it's become more and more clear that those hints were more than likely just illusions. The damage, the cumulative results of decades of work, has apparently indeed been done.

Right now, as I type this, my rights as a human being are in doubt because of my gender, my travel between states possibly to be questioned in the near future, my power to make decisions over my own body reduced beyond those of a corpse, and far beneath those of a gun. Books are being banned in schools and challenged in libraries and private booksellers. Public education is essentially being eliminated in Arizona. Children in more than one state (and their parents) are under direct attack if they do not conform to conservative (and provably inaccurate) gender binaries... for no rational reason other than that the existence of anyone outside those binaries challenges the biases of a fanatical minority. The agencies that were meant to protect our ability to breathe air and drink water with fewer toxins have been hamstrung by a bought-and-paid for court majority that has tied anything resembling logic and reason in knots as it cherry picks and time travels to "justify" decisions that were made before they donned their robes. The forces behind the literal, actual, caught-on-camera-in-real-time attack on our national capital are, barring an absolute political miracle, going to walk away not only untouched, but emboldened and rewarded with even more power, because history teaches us that an unpunished coup is just a trial run. Walls between church and state that were explicitly called for at our nation's founding are being demolished. And with cases on the court docket that will all but ensure the end of free presidential elections...

Yet, still, not enough people apparently care.

Still, the media plays its clickbait games and shrugs away any responsibilities with "both sides" cowardice.

Still, we get lots of angry words and sound bites and not enough tangible actions or leadership at the national level to back up those fighting like Hell at local and state levels.

Still, we get butter knives brought to AR-15 gun fights, and the same political tactics that didn't work before used over and over again in a display of suicidal madness.

Still, as we cannonball straight into theocracy and fascism, there appears to be no hand on the brakes, because even acknowledging brakes might be "divisive".

And nobody can even make the glib excuse that "the trains still run on time" because infrastructure has been gutted along with everything else.

If I thought I had a snowball's chance in Hades of making a go of it in another country - if I could find one that wasn't on a similar trajectory, even - I'd be packing my bags right now, but I really don't see any viable options for a part-time light warehouse worker in her mid-40's without a degree.

I'm still voting. I'm still contributing what little I can where I can. I'm doing all I can do, even if it's simply not agreeing with this tyranny being forced upon me.

But I don't see how this ends well at all, for me or the majority of us. Not for at least a generation. If then.

So, no, I will not be celebrating my country's independence on July 4.

My independence died with the blow of a Supreme Court gavel. All that's left is for us to fall down.