4Jul, 2025
Independence Day: A Celebration That No Longer Feels Like Freedom

I used to love Independence Day. It was my favorite holiday outside my Christian observances — Maundy Thursday and Easter anchor my soul, but the Fourth of July always lifted my spirit.

I remember waking early to prep the yard. Lugging coolers packed with sodas and salads across dew-wet grass. The pop and hiss of the grill firing up. Kids darting through sprinklers while grown-ups lounged on folding chairs, sunburnt and smiling. At dusk, we’d pass out sparklers and gather on blankets to watch the night sky crackle with reds, whites, and blues.

One year, I even got married on July 3rd — so our wedding night could end with fireworks. I wanted my own piece of that freedom, my own celebration of hope under a bursting sky.

This Year, The Fireworks Feel Empty

But this year, Independence Day feels empty. It feels stolen. The country those fireworks once represented doesn’t exist for millions of us anymore.

How do you wave a flag for liberty when people can’t decide what happens to their own bodies? When our highest court rips away privacy and bodily autonomy while pretending they’re protecting freedom?

How do you cheer for freedom when libraries face book bans, truth is scrubbed from history classes, and entire communities are told they can’t exist as they are? From drag bans to bathroom bills to hateful rhetoric, our LGBTQ+ neighbors are under siege — again — by people who claim to stand for “family values.”

Well look at that! Our red, white, and blue being marred by orange…

Hatred Has Found a New Home

We used to call America a “melting pot.” We took pride in it — even as we tried to forget that this country was built on stolen land, on the backs of enslaved people, on broken treaties with Indigenous nations. We boasted that we welcomed “the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Now, hatred has found a home here again — loud and unashamed. People of color, immigrants, LGBTQ+ families, the unhoused, the poor, the sick, the veterans who served — all branded expendable by a regime that would rather import wealthy South Africans to replace the very people America once promised to lift up.

That’s the plan: swap out the dreamers for the donors. Trade community for cruelty. Strip away the melting pot and serve up a gated community for the powerful few.

Independence Day For Whom?

So today, I sit here — alone, like so many others — wondering: who is Independence Day really for now? Who gets to claim freedom? Who’s invited to the backyard cookout?

It’s not me. It’s not the single mom choosing between rent and groceries. It’s not the kid too scared to come out at school. It’s not the immigrant who crossed oceans for hope only to find a locked door. It’s not the veteran sleeping in a tent while billionaires buy up farmland for profit. It’s not the seniors who are being threatened to lose everything, that they already paid for.

France’s 2025 gift for our Independence Day…This is what people voted for…the world to see us ashamed.

I Am Ashamed, But I Am Not Done

I am ashamed of this America. Ashamed that hatred is now policy. Ashamed that we are watching rights crumble while we clap for fireworks. Ashamed that our leaders lie to our faces and dare call it freedom.

But I am not done with her. Not yet.

Independence was never given to us. It was fought for. It was defended. It was demanded — and it must be demanded again. So I won’t light a sparkler tonight. I will light something bigger in my heart: the will to stand up, to speak out, to remind us all that freedom is not a promise — it’s a fight.

So if you feel alone tonight, know you are not. If you feel ashamed of this America, know you are not alone in that either. The dream isn’t dead. But it is up to us to resurrect it.

Happy Independence Day — if you can find it. If not, help me build it back.

-Judy T.

P.S. Please comment below, sharing your favorite 4th of July memory!

References

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