Independence Day
Let freedom ring, let the white dove sing
Let the whole world know that today
Is a day of reckoning
Let the weak be strong, let the right be wrong
Roll the stone away, let the guilty pay
It's Independence Day
—Martina McBride, “Independence Day”
—
I didn’t realize how deep the indoctrination went until one day it surfaced and made itself visible.
My whole life, everyone has been telling me that the Revolutionary War was about freedom because you have freedom when you elect your government and you don’t have freedom when you have a monarchy. It took learning more (I don’t know everything) about how the government works in the United Kingdom to understand I hadn’t been given the whole story. Those people can sign petitions to their government and don’t go to prison for it. They can vote. They can elect representatives to speak for them in government. They can’t elect their entire government, obviously, but neither can Americans.
Anyway, if I voted for the opponent of whoever ends up in the White House, it follows that I did not elect my head of state. If I voted for the opponent of whoever represents my congressional district, it follows that I did not elect my congressional representative. And so on and so forth. We Americans are so often ruled by people we didn’t even want ruling over us, and we don’t bat an eyelash because someone told us this was “freedom.”
“Freedom” is relative. I have to admit the British people have the freedom to not have to panic every four years lest their new head of state remove whatever rights they gained in the previous four years. Or in the previous fifty years. Or in 1783.
These days you can’t even be assured that whoever wins the majority vote will actually take office.
If you think I’m talking about the orange man, I am. But from 2016.
—
It is tiresome how many American holidays there are for people who put on special clothes and make noise with large boomy sticks and, as a certain ugly fat man often put it, kill people and break things.
Even more tiresome the way they are all uncritically labeled as heroes.
I am reminded of the man in my then-husband-to-be’s company who had to get stitches in the back of his scalp in Mike’s barracks room, right in front of me, because on a Friday night he’d drunk too much and then decided that surfing on the roof of a moving car would be a fab idea. It was get the former medic down the hall to fix him or risk him getting an Article 15 for damage to government property.
At least that one didn’t involve me. Only the men were heroes. The women were the unit fuckdolls, either potential or actual. If we were very lucky, the men only questioned our fitness for duty due to the sex-based fitness standards instead of seeing us as walking Fleshlights.
Long after I was out I still found myself correcting friends who said things like “our boys in uniform.” I spent many years not mentioning my service unless it was to one-up in an argument. I’m not sure which was sadder: that this is considered valid one-upping in America, or that so many people fell for it.
I can say I was definitely not free. My time and my life were never my own. I’m not sure how unfree people can possibly fight for freedom, but I’m sure some fucking wit’s going to try to explain it to me.
—
The final time I tried living with my father, my brother smoothed things over with him first. He reminded our father that if things got really bad between Dad and me, I wasn’t going to stay and put up with it, I was going to run.
I didn’t think it had gotten that obvious.
Might be weird to think about with all the bluster I throw around online, but I tend not to stand my ground and shout in meatspace. My experience is that everyone wants to fight me but no one wants to fight for me or even on my side. I’ve had — count ‘em — exactly one person who ever fought for me, but it became apparent early on that she fought everybody. I was nothing special. She was as likely to turn on me as to protect me.
No one else even wanted to protect me. So I learned to beat feet early.
It is what it is: I’m feral. If other people do not know how to behave, I am not going to keep railing at them about it, I am going to decide I must be unwelcome and I will remove myself from that source of stress. It is every living being’s instinct to get away from pain. I am not special in that regard. I have just spent far less time brainwashing myself into believing that escape is not a valid coping strategy. Well, I am not in prison, comatose, or dead. I guess it must be fucking valid after all.
I’ll take real freedom whatever fucking way I can find it.