Technically it is late now, and I cannot represent this post as something relative to the holiday known as the Fourth Of July, AKA the Birthday of the USA, AKA Independence Day, when the colonists cut the drunken umbilical cord between America and that wee little island called Britain, and just look at us now!
Look at us now! Look at how big we have grown! Shouldn't our mother England be proud at least, even if we had to fight to get away? Shoot down her flammable apron and make sure we found our own way? And our own way was Democracy - with wars defending it, constitutions amending it.
And thus, the mighty United States of America, the greatest nation to ever exist and that ever was, and that will ever be, finds herself (or himself, really) to be 235 years old - quite young really, if you think of the other nations, like France, or Japan, or frankly, Britain. We are still a toddler in this world of it all; and yet we gave the finger better and more strongly than anyone else. We've done a lot, and there is still much, much to be done, before we can call our mission relatively accomplished. I cannot imagine that the world will one day find a time where the United States is no longer needed . . . but all good things must end, you know.
"The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one." - Christopher Hitchens, in his introduction to Brave New World.
Two things come to mind from tonight. Quite ironically, both came to me without me coming across this Huxley-based statement. I spent tonight not within the clutches of my mother (miraculously), but within the throttle of 'friends.' Okay, well one of them was indeed a good amigo of mine; he knows I am gay and we have had long talks into the night about things - two qualities that I use to judge my friends (and in the context of it all, I am right to judge when it comes to love and loss). One of the other people who were sitting in this jacuzzi hass always come off to me as a homosexual, but I am not truly sure. His voice is very deep, but it has a feminine, gay air about it; he wears those tight, ripped below the knees jeans, and he has never been truly known to like women. However, in the pool, one of the other persons, whom I did not know, brought up the subject of homosexuality when he said that one of his friends had told him that an individual in his current class - a Freshman - was in fact, gay. Or in his own words, "he once sucked a guy's dick." The boy whom I was sure to be gay that was in the pool with us - who, honestly, I had taken an affection to - laughed with this fellow who they knew, and I did not, and it seemed very normal in the crew that this boy who they did not know was quite peculiar because he was gay, and should be a common topic to be brought up at friendly jacuzzi gatherings, since hearing of this gay boy was like hearing that he had an ex-convict, a Nazi, or an AIDS-positive freakshow sitting with him in his classroom. I would have loved to have said, well, why is that funny? Why is that worth bringing up here? Hearing them laugh was indeed dampening my hair more than that water. Here was my excerpt of American freedom - the light shining out behind a closet door. Take me to New York I said alone, take me to Columbia.
Another thought: What is this American gothic? What is this American society, now, with its enemies and its demagogic rise to power? We've always had enemies, whether they be Japanese turned Nazis, Nazis turned Russians, Russians who now live in the Middle East and carry AK-47s under their turbans . . . we as a society have survived as our enemies fall. Like in Orwell's 1984, the One World Government had to be split into sectors; each 'nation' was convinced that they were always at war with the other, always winning, always fighting on end. They needed an enemy. We send our soldiers off end once again to an unwinnable war, as we did in Vietnam, Korea . . . the other day I saw a Confederate flag waving in our streets . . . yesterday my mother scolded me again about my 'preference' . . . I wonder if I am good enough to leave here this way . . . I just want to learn, I just want to love, if only they can know . . .
And as the last firework, green and silent, exploded into the newborn year of the young United States of America, I watched with hungry eyes, and asked myself, "When will I be Free? When will these fireworks mean something for me?"
