Thread by @JYSexton

The Fourth of July has always been a holiday filled with bombast and pomp and circumstance.

Now, in an age of plague and silence, Americans need to reflect on our ugly history, how we got to this crisis, and move past our simplified, heroic mythology.

themuckrake.com/main/fourth

The truth is that the fireworks and parades and carnivals were all celebrations of our warring successes, but also distractions from our shameful history.

With all that canceled, it's time to really reckon with who we are, who we've been, and who we could be.

We could never have reached this point, with Trump, with our societal breakdown, with our faulty, inhuman economy, if we had not embraced a nationalistic, religious mythology of the country that has no basis in reality.

So many of us are waking up, but we have to escape it. Now.

We have to stop worshiping America.

We have to stop treating our Founding Fathers like infallible prophets instead of slaveholding, wealthy white men.

We have to find the truth of America and find it fast before we sink in the abyss.

We're running out of time.

We treat the Fourth of July like a national Christmas, and that's for a reason.

Our history has been so interconnected and intertwined with religious mythology and the lie of American Exceptionalism powered by God that we can't tell the lie from truth anymore.

It has to end.

In times of distress and war and crisis, people have had to sit in reflection.

This is our time.

We have to reject this false worship of America, this mythology of nationalist religion, and find something better, something fairer, something realer, something more human.