Enjoy your patriotic holiday.

As you salute the flag, and watch the fireworks, and eat hot dogs and fill your heart with the pride of what it means to be an American—Please do an equally American thing—at least it was at one time, an American thing—and think of those who suffer under torturous regimes world wide, those who do not enjoy the alleged freedoms you enjoy; think of those babies locked in cages, without diapers, sleeping on concrete floors, wrapped only aluminum foil blankets, probably forever separated from their families.

As much as Betsy Ross and apple pies and hot dog eating contests, that too is a very real part of your America.

Then maybe ponder how this can be allowed to continue when it is NOT, despite what you’ve learned from hours of research on Fox News, illegal, to enter the United States to seek asylum.

Maybe you can stop by the Statue of Liberty and read:

“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-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Maybe later do some light reading, like on the differences between patriotism and nationalism.

You don’t need to pretend to have the answers to simply agree that something like this is profoundly and fundamentally wrong and completely Un-American. We just need to start with, “There is a problem, this ain’t how you fix it.”

It costs us nothing to say, “This is wrong and we cannot stand for it!” It requires no allegiance or agency. It requires only the decency we claim defines us.

‘Murcia…

Two guys I care about got into it pretty bad yesterday. I made me think about the Presidents of my lifetime. There was never any love from me for any of them. Maybe at times an allegiance, never worship, never adulation.

My father hated Kennedy with a passion. I started to become aware during Nixon. I hated him more than my dad could have ever hated JFK. The dead girl on the ground and Kent State will never leave me. Nixon turned the military on us that day—May 4, 1970.

Ford — was a weak cartoon, a placeholder while we recovered from Nixon.

Jimmy Carter — A good guy, but his one term was held hostage by the Iranians. I had little respect for him or his policies. I think he’s an exemplary person, just never a great president.

Reagan — His “trickle-down economics,” was the beginning of the end of the middle class. Even with that, I thought he was a calming voice during tragedies like the Challenger explosion. He was a capitalist stooge, but he wore the decorum the office required well.

That decorum wore thin and I grew to hate him when he spat on his heritage and sided with Maggie Thatcher. Reagan took a knee for the Queen of England and was knighted while boys like Bobby Sands starved and died in Irish prisons. It makes me happy to wake up every day in the world where Reagan and Thatcher are no longer poison the air with their breath. If I ever get to England I will piss on that rancid bitch’s grave.

Bush I — was a former director of the CIA, that told me more about him than I needed to know. He may be somebody’s, “Gampy,” and he jumped out of airplanes at 90. Good for him. CIA is no better than KGB.

Clinton — I never trusted him. There were too many sketchy skeletons in his closet. Bubba and his wife were a pair I had little use for. It was during the blowjob impeachment I came to realize that we look to these thugs as moral leaders. That is our biggest failing. Using power to get your dick sucked was never, to me, an impeachable offense, but it was not something I could, or would, admire.

Bush II — an easily manipulated idiot who probably stole the election from Gore. I’m not sad about that. I think Gore would have been a disaster, but he probably wouldn’t have sent 4000 American kids, and countless Iraqis to their grave, so Dick Cheney could score a cool $34.5 billion. Cheney is a vile son of a bitch, just slightly ahead of the dead Thatcher in my book. Tipper Gore running around deciding what music we should listen to always struck me as a little disconcerting.

In 2004, John Kerry ran against Bush II. That was the first time I thought I’d seen the bottom of the barrel. I wonder to this day if John Kerry walks around with a pair of Jayne Fonda’s panties in his back pocket.

Obama — I voted for McCain. I didn’t dislike Obama, I didn’t care he was black, in fact, I thought it was past time this nation put its racist history behind us and elected a black man. I liked that Obama was a constitutional scholar. I voted for McCain because I believed then, and still do, if you are going to send young men to their death, you should fully understand war, on a personal level. Sarah Palin, concerned and confounded me. I’d no idea what she’d become.

I’m still pissed off that NOT ONE bankster spent ONE HOUR in jail for almost destroying the world economy. And that the day after the economy began to recover the same shitheads that nearly destroyed it were right back to work pulling the same exact shit. Obama let that slide. Many, many of these capitalists, corporate shitheads should still be rotting in prison.

Trump—voting for HRC almost made me sick to my stomach. I didn’t vote for her, I voted against Trump. I think the current president is a disgrace. I think he’s not a bright man, he has no values I share, thinks himself above the law and Is unqualified and compromised. A racist coward. I don’t think HRC was a whole lot better choice, but would have been, like Ford, I’d hope a placeholder while we healed. That didn’t happen.

I have a friend who was ruined financially by some of Obama’s tactics in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deep Water Horizon and voted for Trump. I have another friend who was ruined by Trump’s business tactics in NYC. I respect both of these guys equally. At least they know why they voted the way they did.

And then there are Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, Ted Cruz, Jerry Nadler… the NY Governor, Andrew Cuomo. He just took $250,000 from the Hasidic voting block.

My point is none of them are any good. Some had some good points, None of them ever have or ever will have our backs. We need to not idolize these men, we need to not fight each other defending them. They’d not do the same for us. The best of the best men on this list, on their best day, were and are, and always will be members of an elite club, we can never belong to. I registered as a Republican in 1975—an Eisenhower Republican—By 2012 and Mittens Romney I knew that party was forever gone. After Trump, I knew I could no longer be affiliated with that party, even by name, ever again.

I voted for two Republicans in my life. Reagan and McCain. I’ve never voted party line.

I’m sorry Dad, I liked Ike, and I joined his party in your honor, but John Kennedy and how he handled the Cuban Missile Crisis is why any of us are here today having this conversation. Barak Obama’s policies somehow saved the economy from Bush II and the banksters. These three are the best I’ve seen. The worst, choose any others from the list above.

As another July 4th approaches we really need to stop the lie once and for all and examine the alleged greatness of the “Founding Fathers,” Washington owned human beings, Jefferson, the man who penned the Declaration of Independence, owned people and regularly fucked them. You can’t whitewash this stuff, you can’t say, “That was then and blacks were property, not people.” Bullshit—they knew exactly what they were doing and they did it anyway. The founders were such cowards they shelved the entire discussion of slavery until the 1830s, knowing full well they’d all be dead and gone by then. Gutless, fucking cowards who orchestrated and participated in a power, money and land grab that we celebrate, still, with fireworks and some baffled ‘pride.’

There are so many things worth fighting for, worth fighting over. We will lose 80,000 this year to opioids, 40,000 to gun violence, the system we live under is one of institutional and systematic racism, it’s been a fundamental part of the system since day one. Our healthcare is a mess and getting worse and less affordable. We have kids going off to war and coming home and sleeping in cardboard boxes. We have a militarized police force, killing us on the streets for selling untaxed cigarettes. We have kids going to bed at night starving, in the ”greatest nation on earth.” We jail babies. The list is endless. Go fight about that stuff!

I have no issue bloodying a knuckle to fight anyone, I’ll be goddamned if I’ll fight any of you defending any of these men listed above.

These men, Democrat and Republican, right-wing and left-wing are playing a part, knowing full well what they are doing.

While we fight each other they take more power and control.

Every day as we fight each other defending them, they are golfing together, dining together, laughing at us. Laughing their way to the bank.

We need to stop giving away our precision breath, and energy fighting for them and start standing up for ourselves. I see this nation about to bust open into civil war. How many of us are going to die defending men who would step over your dead carcass on the way to get lunch.

I read an articles about the decline of the outlaw truckers this morning. Every time I get out on the highway and I get tangled in with a bunch of semi’s I can’t help but think about some of the guys I used to know.

I look in the windows of the trucks as I’m passing them. I see the straight-arrow patroits wearing an American flag on the shoulder of their uniforms, company men. Accurate logbooks, and seals on the trailers, and no more than 10 hours a day behind the wheel. Coffee and Winston cigarettes. The, “Coffee, that’s my drug,” truckers, the heroes of the highway, and too many sad country songs.

Than I think about the assholes I used to roll with. Rolling pharmacies, hundred thousand pound parties on wheels. Take a few hits of microdot, turn up the Floyd, and go Space Truckin’.

Guys so strung out they would reach a point where they actually could not make sentences. You’d go to talk to these guys at a truck-stop and they’d stare at you with vacuous eyes, but no words would emerge from their lips. One time, one guy quacked like a duck, looked shocked, then laughed hysterically and peed himself. Good times…

A small arsenal in the sleepers—had to protect the load—and for the love of God do not look at what’s back there in that trailer.

I can remember driving 200 miles out of the way on back roads in the middle of the night to avoid a weigh station. It wasn’t because we were heavy.

These guys, my friends, we were never immortalized in song. Kind of sad really. We were a lot more interesting. Conway Twitty and Porter Wagoner wanted nothing to do with us…

Lowell George did though, “Weed, whites and wine…”

The old woman pressed the flat palms of both her hands along her lap, trying to straighten the creases in her old, faded blue and white cotton house-dress. Then she looked back up at me and continued. ”Late July was a slow time, life kind of moved like mud up in them hills. A sweaty hot month, and nobody wanted to get goin’ too fast to go pickin’ in that hot sun.”

”Jimmy was fresh home from the big war. He went and got his-self lost in France for a year or two, we figured he was dead. I suppose I was happy as most when we seen him walkin’ his tired ass up that narrow dirt path, in between them blueberry bushes, smiling and a wavin’ like a hero.”

“I know’d looking at him that day he’d changed. A lot of boys went to that war and come home different, sad, kind of broke down. Not Jimmy, he walked like a man with a big plan and a bigger dick.”

“I didn’t think much of Jimmy or his dick at the time. I turned and went back up on the hill to pick them goddamn berries. I used to like to pick up by the dead lake, Lake Maratanza, they called it. That water was crystal clear all the way to the bottom. Nothing lived in it. No fish, no weeds, nothin’. There probably some science reason. We all just said it was a magic lake. When it got too hot pickin’ I’d strip off my clothes and jump in. The ice cold water damn near give ya’ a heart attack. Way up high, on top of the mountain, not even a tree for a mile or so. We called it the ‘sky lake.’ I’d lay on my back and feel like you was floatin’ in the sky.”

”I’ll not forget that day, I just climbed up out of the water and up on a big white rock. Jimmy come up behind, while I was naked, and raped me. He said it was my fault, fer bein’ naked and pretty. Later on, after I’d run home, so did my daddy. Jimmy said he’d been lonesome what with the war and all. That’s how it was back in them days. Most men is cowards to the subject of rape and I supposed Jimmy and my daddy was like most men.”

“Amyways, up on that white rock I turned on around, still naked, as Jimmy was zippin’ up his pants. I kicked him full on I the nuts. Kicked him so damn hard he flewed off the rock like a big-ass, goddamn bird, and a holding his nuts with one hand and the other a flappin’ in the air, he went down into the cold water. The bastard near drowned, doubled over from the gut pain. I watched him struggle as I put my work dress back on.“

“He didn’t drown, I’m neither here nor there on that fact, I recon. Jimmy climbed out of the water by his-self, he never come after me again unless it wanted it.”

“Sometimes I think I married him so he’d keep that swinging dick from raping any other girls up there on the ridge.”

“So, anyhow, that’s how we come to be married and whatnot. After he come‘d home from the big war.”