How can we celebrate today when liberty and justice for all seem so far away?

As a kid, I used to love the 4th of July. My dad liked to go to the town square to watch the fireworks. I would wave my little American flag and listen to the announcers read passages from the Founding Fathers or the Gettysburg Address. Like most of you, I grew up reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, genuinely believing that we would fight for “liberty and justice for all.” Yet, some of those things began to fade by the time I reached my late teens, as I watched my friends' boots land on the ground in Iraq. The illusion of what I had been told was suddenly clashing with the reality happening around us all. Soon, they started using a type of double-speak, like calling the erosion of freedom and systemic racial profiling “The Patriot Act.” At a young age, I began fulfilling my patriotic duty by protesting.

I was just twenty years old the first time I was arrested at a protest. I was holding a copy of the Constitution in my hands when they put me in handcuffs. I wore that arrest with a sense of pride, honor, and duty to my country. I fought that arrest, and it made the local papers. They called me a “First Amendment Crusader” in the headlines.

That would become the first of many such clashes over a long course of a now lifelong devotion to activism.

I've lived long enough to see moments of activism win, such as the time we helped overturn a series of unjust city ordinances, or even on the national level, as bells rang out when marriage equality was made legal. Yet, I have also watched as freedoms have eroded from abortion rights to the police now wearing face coverings while throwing people in unmarked vans.

So, what do we do with the 4th of July on the 249th birthday of an America that feels less free today than at any other time in most of our lifetimes?

First, we must face the harsh reality that the freedom many of us feel is slipping away has never been a universal reality for everyone in this nation. From its inception, there have always been folks who were never listed under the category of “all” when we heralded liberty and justice.

We must remember that for every mythology we have grown to believe, there is almost always a more complex truth hiding beneath the surface. Take the Boston Tea Party, for example. Yes, it is true that in a dramatic protest against the perceived unfair taxation by the British Crown against the colonies, dozens of young men rushed the Boston Harbor and began to toss tea into the waters below. This event, now regarded as a moment of American exceptionalism and bravery, has a darker underbelly. The reality is, those men dressed as Indigenous people so that they wouldn’t get caught and in hopes that any blame would be placed on the native inhabitants of the land they were now calling theirs.

Beyond all of that, the reality of the colonial fight for freedom didn’t begin at the Boston Tea Party but the Boston Massacre when soldiers shot into a crowd of protestors, killing at least three people, one of them being a free black man by the name of Crispus Attucks. The events that followed created a very different kind of nation when John Adams decided to defend the soldiers in court. Though this was viewed as a betrayal by many, this action became the framework for the Sixth Amendment because everyone should have the right to a fair trial and representation, which became a bedrock of American philosophy, because Adams decided that even these men that a mob wanted to kill deserved a trial that they never would have received otherwise.

Yet, it would be another six years before independence would be declared and a war would rage. A war that most thought could never be won. However, we did, and the reverberations of that rang around the world; now, some 65 countries celebrate their independence from the British Crown.

We have a long list of accomplishments and utter failures as a nation. For every freedom that has been purchased through picket lines and protests, they were bought at the expense of decades of subjugation.

Rockets will fly over the sky tonight, and many people will celebrate a national freedom with a severe case of irony deficiency. In contrast, countless numbers of people sit in modern-day concentration camps awaiting to be sent away to other nations that they don’t call home. Yet, the place they have called home has rejected them. We have failed, yet again, at a promise written at the feet of the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

The truth is, we don’t spend enough time talking about how long a struggle can last. The period from the Boston Massacre to the end of the Revolutionary War was thirteen years. Sadly, most fights for liberation do not happen in an instant. Rarely do oligarchs look down from the glass castles to the huddled masses below with their colorful signs and say, “Oh, shit, I guess we should stop being bad guys!” No, they bring in the police, the activists are arrested, maligned in the media, typically assassinated, and then we eventually name streets, parks, holidays, and boats after them once we finally correct course, sometimes decades later.

Then again, other times we live in moments when those names are stripped from streets, parks, holidays, and boats, attempting to erase the reality of the work of these activists.

The question becomes, how much hope should one have on a day like today? Should we have the same level of hope that the American Revolutionaries had when those first shots rang out against the British? Maybe the same level that Harriet Tubman had when she took her gun to confront the Confederates to fight for the liberation of her people. Perhaps we should have the hope of Malcolm X or James Baldwin.

If I have learned anything from history, it is this: there is always hope.

There were still weddings taking place in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Hope can be found in the darkest of spaces if we are willing to have eyes to see it.

I believe that a day will come when streets will be named after many of the liberation fighters who are being arrested during this time. Sadly, that also means that so many of these activists will pay the ultimate price for freedom, laying down one's life for their friends. My partner, Tashina, calls this “The problem of the dash.” That is because we don’t think of those long spans of history between the initial fight and the freedom, and we forget the dash that looks like this 1770-1783. Lost in that dash are thousands of lives, hopes, and dreams. We brush over that dash in school, but it is where a great amount of history takes place, not when an event begins or ends, but the reality of life lived and lost in the middle as we toil for freedom.

Sadly, my dear friends, I can not tell you how long of a dash we are set to live in this time. Will it be as long as the sin of slavery, or will it remain as unresolved as many of the other atrocities people have suffered under the shadow of our nation? I can not say. In reality, the dash is only as short or long as we are willing to allow it to be.

What I do know is this, if we can take in small sparkle of hope from those bombs bursting in air tonight, let it be this troubling truth for anyone who wishes for power; we can beat the king. If anything is true from all the distortions of an American history as we have been given, that is a remaining truth that we can cling to. If we, the people, are willing to strive together, to put aside petty differences for the sake of liberty and justice, we all can and will defeat this. History has shown us time and again that those who wear red typically do not fare well in the battle.

I can not tell you when, but somewhere in the distance, I see a day when we are celebrating again. There are children playing in the fields of Mahmoud Khalil Park, sprinklers in hand, and we have won this thing. I don’t know if I am there, but I know it exists out there beyond the picket lines, protests, and profound loss that awaits us ahead. Yet, somewhere over that horizon, the king has fallen, and we are free again. We just can’t get there yet, because no one is truly free until we are all free.

Let freedom ring.