Home of the Free-ish

The United States of Hypocrisy

Last year around this time I asked the question: what does it mean to celebrate freedom and independence in the United States in this day and age? I still think it’s a fair question, even more relevant this year. I also still think it very much depends on who you ask.

It’s not lost on me that many in our country: A.) simply don’t believe any rights have been taken away from anyone (at least anyone who didn’t deserve it) or B.) don’t care because it does not affect them personally and, furthermore C.) they are sick of hearing about it.

I can’t blame anyone on that last point, honestly. I’ve had it with reality too. I wish I had the confidence to not give my freedom a second thought, just whistling Yankee Doodle Dandy without a care in the world. Pass the mustard. What time do the fireworks start?

Reality is funny, though. It doesn’t take anyone’s personal beliefs or feelings into account. Objectively, Americans are less free than we used to be and we have seen rights can vanish quite quickly.

Any loss of freedom very much matters to those affected by it and that’s the thing that should matter to everyone. It’s long been pointed out — freedom functions as a group activity, not an individual sport.

“Until we are all free, we are none of us free,” wrote poet Emma Lazarus in 1883.

You may be more familiar with some of her other work.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”

From her poem, The New Colossus, inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.

Photo by Peter Lloyd on Unsplash

It’s funny. I always viewed those words as something for “someone else,” a hopeful but exhausted figure in a grainy old photo from Ellis Island. But there’s something about that “yearning to breathe free” part that really resonates these days.

If we want to get brutally honest: “Land of the Free” has always been a bit of a stretch for the United States. We’ve basically been settling for “close enough” for 249 years. Yes, there has been progress, but it has always been harder and far more violent than it ever needed to be. Rights have been rolled back, they’re being challenged in court, politicians play with people’s lives. If you ask me, this is not freedom.

And I’m really not here to shoot off fireworks as we backslide into the Dark Ages.

I can’t help but notice the same people who can’t say enough about the rag-tag colonists and brave and brilliant Founding Fathers rarely utter a peep about suffragettes or civil rights leaders and yet they’ll jaw your ear off with speeches so star-spangled it’s enough to raise Kate Smith from the dead for one more chorus of God Bless America.

I have no intention of shooting off fireworks this 4th of July — it upsets dogs and confuses the wildlife. Plus, I’ve become very attached to all my fingers. I’d much rather shoot my mouth off and not just because I have the freedom to do so, but because I feel a responsibility to use my voice.

People are actively fighting for freedom, for their rights, for their lives, for the freedom to exist peacefully in the United States of America — in real time — right now. I believe the least any of us can do on a holiday that’s supposed honor freedom in a country that claims to revere it so — is mention that.

This essay originally appeared in my column the July 3, 2025 edition of the Perry Herald in Perry, NY.