Is There Anything to Celebrate on this Fourth of July?

It's hard to get in the mood for fireworks when your country is building concentration camps.

I love the sparkling beauty of fireworks against the night sky. I usually never miss them. But this year I’m so ashamed of my country it’s hard to celebrate. Maybe I’ll look for some fireflies instead.

Alligator Alcatraz. Smiling ghouls in front of chain-link cages. The Big Brutal Bill, kicking kids off health care to pump billions into ICE. These are the times that try men’s and women’s souls. All week I’ve been doomscrolling, following the news, scrolling some more, calling congress reps. But now I guess it’s time for a break.

We have to take sanity breaks. We have to. It does the suffering world no good to work ourselves into a such a state that we can’t take any useful action. Usually in my small red town, there’s an awesome firework display on the Fourth, fireworks banging and bursting while the band crashes out The Stars and Stripes Forever. I’m very patriotic, and usually I just love it. But I think this year I’ll skip the fireworks and go outside to watch the fireflies instead.

Theirs is a silent celebration. They don’t fly on windy nights, or in the pouring rain. Fireflies wait till a night of quiet darkness, when the air is still and the leaves rustle gently, and then they get going.

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction—a creature that can light itself up. Bioluminescence is one of the oddest phenomena of nature. Fireflies not only glow, they flash on and off in order to attract a mate. There are many species of fireflies, and they don’t all flash the same way. Each species has its own pattern, a code that only members of the same species can read. One common backyard species flies at dusk about 3 feet off the ground. Every five seconds, the male makes a one-second flash while flying in the shape of a “J.” The female responds with a half-second flash of her own at the third second. Then he flashes again. With quiet persistence, they get their message across.

But how on earth do these tiny bugs create light? The answer is that no one really knows. The exact process by which these remarkable little creatures turn that light on and off to blink out a complicated code is still not completely understood. But while we’re trying to figure it out, they keep on quietly blinking.

So take a firefly break. Swim, eat hot dogs, do whatever you do on the Fourth of July. Ignore Trump’s bragging for a while. And after the break, we’ll get back to work.

Jay Kuo, my favorite political writer, has just released an account of the torture and brutality going on in the immigrant detention camps. It’s very tough reading, you may want to let it go till Monday. But this news needs to be spread. I often wonder how my fellow Americans can possibly be so cruel, so callous as to allow this. But for some of them, the truth is that they don’t realize. The sheer number of people who aren’t aware that this is going on is amazing. Some get their “news” from sewers masquerading as news channels, of course, and even if you follow mainstream media, it hardly mentions the worst stuff. And a huge proportion of folks just tune it out altogether. I don’t do politics, they say proudly, as though that was a virtue. And some people know, deep down inside, that terrible things are happening out there—but they don’t want to know they know.

So what can we do? Amplify, amplify, amplify.

That seems to be our main role right now. Talk about it. As we meet family and friends on this most American of all holidays, don’t ignore the elephant in the room. Bring it up, argue about it, piss off your MAGA relatives. Share those social media posts and ignore the trolls. Write that letter to the editor.

With quiet persistence, keep flashing your light out into the darkness.

Dear Friends,

Are you grieving the state of the world and wondering what to do about it? I hope you’ll continue to check out The Optimistic Activist.

Every now and then I post some ideas for doing something. How to get out the vote, spread the word, and support progressive candidates. Ideas for simple but effective activism. As easy, as practical, as do-able as I can make them.

Together, I think, we can really make a difference.

“Optimism is a strategy for making a better future.”

--Noam Chomsky