On the Anniversary of Our Independence We Celebrate What We're About to Lose.

And now we gear up for battle. Because this is America and they're not.

All photos by author

It’s bad. It’s awful. It’s quite possibly worse than we might ever have imagined. Yesterday we said goodbye to any thought that our country, the United States of America, might survive the ravages of a mad plan to destroy the good in us and take away our freedoms, our safety, our ability to govern peaceably and lawfully.

Yesterday, the Trump regime, in all its vile, vicious ugliness, with methods in the making for years and broadly announced, did, in fact, with aid and comfort by both Congress and the Supreme Court majorities, take away our independence.

It’s the Fourth of July, 2025, and all I can think to do today is remember and celebrate the country that used to be. My country. Your country. Our country. Our beautiful, imperfect, wonderful, maddening giant of a nation, its 50 states spread across a vast landscape from oceans to mountains, to plains, to deserts, to farmland, to cities, to villages where people of all colors and cultures and religions and lifestyles have cohabited for more than two centuries in a society that, to be fair, worked for some and not for others, but kept on striving to find that balance. We tried to be mostly good.

This is the country we sought to preserve and protect and settle into, as if nothing would ever harm it—or us—as if we would go on living in a country singled out as the leader of the free world, the country to look up to, the country most likely to succeed.

Our Declaration of Independence (See below) held such promise. It was both a plan for a future nation and a warning to those who might seek to undo the glorious, brave endeavor ahead. It shouted our strength. It cemented our purpose. It was written with pride and patriotism, then boldly, gloriously signed by a roomful of wealthy, fallible, brave men—who, agreed, hadn’t yet acknowledged the value of women or people of color, we’re still working on that—and delivered to a king who would be made to understand that America would never become a monarchy.

It looks bad now. It is bad. But I know this: This regime is not America. They will pretend they are, but they can’t come close to the kind of commitment, dedication, acceptance, and determination it takes to build a great nation. They’ve never come close. They wouldn’t know how.

This is our turning point, our call to action. This is our time. This is our do-or-die moment. It’ll be hard. But this is a nation of, by, and for the people. We still have the power. Our strength is in our numbers, in our voices. In our resolve.

We are more than they are. We are better than they are. We are the promise our founders foretold. We can still become the country we were supposed to be. Stubbornness and fortitude are what it takes, and we have that. Now, if we’re the Americans we say we are, we’ll put them to good use in the terrible days and years ahead.

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