The Truth Will Set Us Free
How the 4th of July Could Finally Represent Freedom
Last week I zoomed out 10,000 years in attempt gain perspective and remove some of the judgment around the darkness that seems to be pervading the world as we enter an era of collapse—a pattern humans seem to have been re-enacting for thousands of years across the globe since large-scale hierarchical systems began taking form.
This week, I’m zooming back in to modern times, and the last 250 years leading up to this moment in the U.S., inspired by something I read yesterday morning—an emotional post about the upcoming 4th of July and what it means for this significant anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to fall during such a horrifying period in the country’s history. The post expressed grief over what the writer sees as a “desecration of 250 years of American sacrifice” as Trump and his family transform our national anniversary into a “disgraceful humiliating… spectacle—converting the labor, courage, and sacrifice that built this Republic into profit for himself…”
This piece describes the reaction I had, which I think many of us may be feeling in varying degrees. It is not meant in any way to critique this other writer (I had some similar feelings a year ago) or to shame “we the people” of the United States for not preventing this. Rather, it is an attempt to put these feelings into context and reframe the 250th anniversary as a revealing of truth and a path forward.
A Long History of Abolishing Freedom
I understand the sense of despair about the upcoming 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. How it feels like a sham, a joke, a desecration of all the hard-won progress ordinary Americans have fought for the past century: civil rights, women's rights, labor rights, environment protection, national parks, Social Security, Medicare, and more.
But the holiday was never celebrating those things won by ordinary Americans. It was celebrating a slave-owning class of white men, in the process of committing a genocide, becoming independent from England because they were being taxed without representation—who then turned around and did the same thing to their own people, taxing them without giving them political power.
So was the Fourth of July ever that serious?
I always felt it was a somewhat silly holiday. Not the actual barbecues and fireworks that bring family and friends together—all of that is fine.
But celebrating a country founded on genocide and on the idea that all wealthy white slave-owning men are equal, while oppressing marginalized communities everywhere, always felt a bit hollow to me.
Historically, I celebrated it as a day symbolizing the concept of freedom itself, and whatever that means to people around the world.
And yet, I too feel intense shame about the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence occurring during this most depraved era of our government.
So I have to remind myself regularly.
Trump being in office on our 250th anniversary is actually fitting.
This is the trajectory we have been on—more or less nonstop—since our inception, and especially since the 1970s, when the people who rallied around the Powell Memo began executing a plan to overturn every right the people of the U.S. fought so hard, and even died for.
The bitter truth is:
The people running our country’s politics and economy have more or less shared Trump’s basic values this whole time, just wrapped in prettier language. Whether or not they consciously agreed with the ideologies behind the atrocities now unfolding within our borders, their actions have, on average, reflected the same priorities: profit, power and property over justice, people and life.
And with some exception, every one of us had some small role to play as well.
Every time we bought from Amazon, knowing its business model was destroying local businesses and its labor practices were oppressive…
Every time we said, “Someone else is going to deal with the Supreme Court corruption crisis” and went on our way…
Every time we voted for the candidate that was most likely to win rather than who shared our values…
Every time we bought the lies that accumulating “more” things we don’t need is progress…
Every time we believed the narrative that it was more noble to be one of the 1% than to change the horrific system that only allows 1% of people to have dignity…
Every time we fell for establishment Democrats being the good guys when most were just right-wingers waving rainbow flags…
Every time we failed to take to the streets when atrocities happened—Iraq War, Citizens United, Bank Bail Outs, Kavanaugh’s appointment, Roe v Wade overturn, Epstein….
…we inadvertently helped set the stage for this monstrosity of a situation we find ourselves in today.
Trump being president during our 250th anniversary is the comeuppance of the millennium.
Our track record in foreign policy says it all: every time a leader in a foreign country—with resources we want—decides to put their people ahead of corporate profits, the United States sanctions them, demonizes them, or enacts a CIA-backed regime-change operation that leads to mass suffering.
That is what the U.S., as a political entity, is and has always been.
The mask is simply off now.
This is the Real Liberation
The truth hurts, but if we dare look at it clearly, it will set us free.
And that is something we can celebrate this Fourth of July.
Freedom from the illusion that we were ever really free.
Freedom from the falsehood that capitalist logic is the best system for the greater good of humanity and the planet.
Freedom from the lie that the U.S. was spreading democracy around the world rather than institutionalizing imperial exploitation of the poor.
Freedom from the pressures to perform adaptability to a system that is inherently cruel, as if that were a sign of mental health.
We, the people, whose eyes have been opened and who are experiencing such grief, can turn this 4th of July into our own victory: a celebration of real, hard-won freedom—of our minds and hearts from the old narrative that kept us bound.
So when the cognitive dissonance starts to overwhelm in the coming weeks leading up to this year’s July 4th, let this offer some solace as we start the real work.
One of the Fall of Empire theme songs (mixed with my lo-fi editing skills)
The Humble Road Ahead
Because this is really just the beginning.
The awakening—the freedom of our minds from the corporate-funded myths and national fairy tales—was excruciatingly painful. Many of us spent years wrestling with information that uprooted our entire understanding of the world, destabilizing us to the core. And yet we kept our eyes open. And that alone is something worth celebrating this 4th of July, offering some small solace as we watch our country fully self destruct and go up in flames—as things that refuse to learn from the past inevitably do.
But our awareness is not the destination. It’s actually the starting place of the real work of building something new, which brings us back to the Declaration of Independence.
For all of the hypocrisy surrounding its authors, there was something profoundly true hidden within the document itself—not in the way it was applied, but in the words themselves.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security… The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”
~Declaration of Indepence
The tragedy of American history is not simply that these principles were betrayed, and used for purposes opposite to their stated intention—like we are seeing now with attempts to invert the spirit of the Civil Rights Act. It is that they were betrayed from the very beginning. And that even after 250 years, the contradiction was never resolved, the mistakes never acknowledged, the transgressions never atoned for. Even the genuinely good policies the U.S. enacted through the painstaking work of the masses—rights for women, Black Americans, labor, nature, safeguards from predatory corporate greed—were tolerated at best by our government and the interests that influenced it.
And here we are watching them light it on fire and roll back every hard-won concession our ancestors fought for.
But perhaps, even this is for best. For 250 years, we were attempting to build on a faulty foundation that was cracked from the moment it was poured.
So despite the horrors happening right now, maybe this is exactly how bad it needs to get—set aflame for complete destruction—for us to be shaken out of timidity, fear, and complacency, and to start the rebuilding that will need to come from the ashes. It’s important that we start now, because while we may not be able to stop the fall, we can have a say in what comes after, if we prepare.
Preparation is going to take different shapes for different people. Please check out this document with the information I have collected so far: a list of resources, organizations to tap into and simple, empowering actions people can take now to begin the process of taking back their power and forming the community strength required to build something better.
History of Revolution
I also recommend listening to this reel, where one of my favorite, albeit intense, lefty thinkers reflects on the events surrounding the Declaration of Independence. Towards the end he offers some really heartening thoughts:
“[R]evolutions aren’t something that you ask for and then receive. Revolutions are things that peoples are forced into by oppressive regimes. A regime insists on being oppressive, revolution is guaranteed. You don’t have to make it happen. You also cannot control the timeline of revolution. However, what you can control is how organized it and how many people survive the revolution. That is your actual goal. You don’t need to start anything. Shit’s being started on its own.
“All you have to be worried about is how do you organize for mutual aid and common defense. And doing that is actually remarkably easy. It doesn’t involve getting battalions of people together and then going and storming buildings. It involves joining an organization, monthly meetings, and then a few committee meetings interspersed. Because the day that the revolution asks more from you than that, it will be very clear what you need to do at that time.” Luke Alexander Brooks
More Reading
I dive deeper into the history of the U.S., — highlighting some of our real people-powered accomplishments — in this essay from last year.
An evolving list of resources for taking people-powered action:
~ About ~
Peaceful Return is a newsletter born out of the urgency to resist the fascist descent of the United States. Drawing from history, psychology, myth, and religion, it seeks to understand the roots of what we are facing—late-stage empire, collective trauma, moral inversion, and the corrupting force of concentrated power—and identify pathways to a better future.
The “Return” in Peaceful Return points to the need to return to our true nature—before imperial, violent narratives severed us from our basic mammalian birthright: the felt sense of worthiness to be alive. The journey is one of casting off the shame imposed on us from above—by those obsessed with power, domination and hierarchy—and reclaiming this birthright.
The “Peaceful” part indicates the intention of avoiding harm to others in the process. However, the journey is not easy. It requires a relentless resistance to every morally inverted system or thought structure that places power, property and profit above life, love and people.
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For those that are overwhelmed with too many subscriptions, you can make a one time contribution at my “Buy me a Coffee” link. As an independent artist with minimal “day job” support, every little bit helps me keep going.
Full Transcript from Wolf of the Brooks talk on the events surrounding the Declaration of Independence":
It’s not that revolution is not currently happening, it’s that our lives are so fast, we are unable to recognize something that moves that slowly. As much as we like to talk about revolution as being these incredibly fast, earth-shattering events, they are only fast in hindsight.
I think the public perception around things like the American Revolution is that basically all of it happened over the course of, like, one to two years. A bunch of people in Boston got massacred, so everyone went down to the docks and grabbed all the tea and threw it in the harbor. And then, you know, people got more pissed off and, like, galvanized by that, so they immediately went down to the Continental Congress and, you know, signed the Declaration of Independence, and then we started fighting. That was when fighting started, and then we fought for, like, maybe a year, but then the Battle of Yorktown was, like, a year later, after Valley Forge was able to happen, and we know that that was sad and dark, but then there was the Yorktown and we won.
[A]ll of that’s act one of Hamilton. Let’s go through those major events, shall we?
The day you probably know is July 4th, 1776. That’s when it feels like everything kind of kicked off.
The Boston Massacre was in 1770, six years before the Declaration of Independence was signed.
The Boston Tea Party was in 1773, three years after the Boston Massacre. It took three years to get that sort of resistance effort going and then actually doing it. As in the Boston Tea Party was still three years away. from the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
But now let’s look at what was roundly considered to be the first battle of the American Revolution. Well, that was the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775, a full year before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The revolution was being fought in set-piece battles before there was round agreement of a revolution even happening yet.
But yes, then we do get to July 4th, 1776, and now we declare our independence, and now it’s just a few battles, right? And suddenly, we have our own country.
Well, the Battle of Yorktown, which is largely considered to be the last major battle of the war, was fought in 1781, five years later.
Now, that’s a pretty reductive history of the American Revolution, but that is also to say that all of these events today are seen as intrinsic parts of the American Revolution, and they took place over the course of 11 years.
Now, there are a lot of problems with applying history to today and saying everything is just going to go the same way. After all, history doesn’t repeat itself, it just rhymes. But if we were to apply the American Revolution as a timeline of revolutionary events to today, what would current events be rhyming with most?
Well, what I see people most often referencing is the fact that all of these warehouse fires are very similar to the Boston Tea Party, the destruction of property while no one is actually getting hurt.
Well, if that’s the case, then our Bunker Hill is like two years away. It also means that whatever our version of the Declaration of Independence is, when all of the resistance forces come together and agree to unite to fight back, well, we’re sitting like three years away from that.
And our Yorktown, our final battle of the revolution, would be eight years from now.
Now, again, that revolution’s timeline is not prescriptive. We do not know that things will go along at that rate. However, I think that thought experiment is really useful for giving us the perspective on current events that is actually the most accurate when it comes to revolutionary politics.
Because over and over and over again, we see something happen in current events. We see our government abuse us in some new way, and we sit there and go, oh my God, why is no one doing anything about this?
And the reality is, there are people doing things about this. There are people who are actively organizing and engaging in the revolution as we speak. It’s just you think this stuff happens faster than it does, and it just doesn’t. Because even though organizing and resistance can feel like it’s moving at a snail’s pace, we can also get a sense that events are slowly happening faster and faster. Things feel like they are accelerating. And with that accelerating pace, ask yourself, does eight years from now feel like a semi-plausible timeline for the path that we are headed?
Because here’s the thing, revolutions aren’t something that you ask for and then receive. Revolutions are things that peoples are forced into by oppressive regimes. A regime insists on being oppressive, revolution is guaranteed. You don’t have to make it happen. You also cannot control the timeline of revolution.
However, what you can control is how organized it is and how many people survive the revolution. That is your actual goal. You don’t need to start anything. Shit’s being started on its own.
All you have to be worried about is how do you organize for mutual aid and common defense. And doing that is actually remarkably easy. It doesn’t involve getting battalions of people together and then going and storming buildings. It involves joining an organization, monthly meetings, and then a few committee meetings interspersed. Because the day that the revolution asks more from you than that, it will be very clear what you need to do at that time.
Revolution is the only path now. The system is vile to its core and lethal. Unfortunately, revolutions are questionable, too. Who leads them, and what are their motivations? Even what is well-intended leads to bureaucracy and results that undermine our future. This is human nature, or I would argue nature, period, the drive of any organism to dominate its environment.
More damningly, even with a great leap forward in our thinking, we have exceeded the boundaries of the planet. She is in charge, always has been. We're in triage mode.
I appreciate your journey on understanding who we are and why we are here.
Excellent work!
Again we are eerily in sync.