The Fourth of July was different this year. Not only were large celebrations cancelled due to COVID-19, but with much of the United States finally coming to terms with and acknowledging our racist history in the context of our national holidays, many of the festivities required reframing. When we stop isolating racism as an academic concept that existed in our past and begin to see it in our day-to-day activities, how do we celebrate a holiday that glorifies its protagonists’ fight for freedom when they were actively denying it to their brethren?
My husband and I decided to create a new tradition and watched the newly released live recording of Hamilton. I love this musical. The score got me through the last several months of graduate school, and the story of the American Revolution, of the scrappy underdogs fighting and winning against the oppressive British Monarchy, is enough to inspire anyone with the Founding Fathers’ American ideals. There are many legitimate criticisms of the musical, including the way it glosses over numerous negative characteristics of its main characters, a group of white, landowning, slave-owning males. However, there are various thought-provoking themes and lyrics that can help us think about the future of our country 244 years later.
In “My Shot,” Alexander sings the following words as they prepare to fight the British in the Revolutionary War:
“And? If we win our independence?
Is that a guarantee of freedom for our descendants?
Or will the blood we shed begin an endless
Cycle of vengeance and death with no defendants?”
Looking back on it now, it seems like we have hit on that cycle of vengeance and death, at least for some of us, as there are many groups in the United States who are far from free. From Black Americans dying from police brutality to immigrant children who are still held captive away from their families to residents of Flint, MI who still lack clean water to Native people on reservations who are constantly being threatened by corporate greed, there continue to be citizens fighting for their independence. And until they find it, the cycle will never end.
The prompt for this week is this:
“Write about a revolution.”
You have as much or as little time as you would like to take. See you next week.
More unedited writing of mine. Ten minutes all about a revolution.
Cycles of Power
One by one,
The replacements rise.
Each installed by a violent –
Or peaceful, as it were –
Revolution.
But why don’t they learn?
If they detested
Oppression, the taxation
Of their tea,
Why impose it on their fellow man?
Instead of tea and taxes,
It’s complete subjugation
Their bodies not their own,
The linear hypopigmentation of their skin,
Scars from the lashes,
Progeny they had no choice
But to birth,
Nowhere to go
But back to the chains.
Do we naturally separate
Into rungs on a ladder
Of society
Stratified by the quantity
Of melanin in our skin?
But why don’t we
Use that power to
End the separation,
With no more levels
There would be no more
Reason to rise up
And start the cycle again.
Writing for Wellness 