This afternoon, at 12:00 PM Central I started a live stream where I did one simple thing: Read the enteritis of the Declaration of Independence. For the nations 250th birthday it only felt fitting, and it wasn’t a long read, so it would be a pretty straightforward stream, and it was, until I finished.
That’s when I realized the emotion I felt, and the deeper realization on how many elements of the tyranny our founding fathers felt 250 years ago are mirrored today, and what followed was raw emotion; me trying to process the love-hate relationship I have with my homeland and processing my continued hope for a better future.
It was something I didn’t expect, but it came naturally to me. All I could conclude was that this feeling was what actual patriotism is — not the nationalist bullshit touted by the regressives on the right, but a pride in the nation as it exists among the world, and a belief that we truly can be better than we have been; that our nation was set up in a way that will allow what the founding fathers say they desired in the document itself… but we aren’t there yet, and have slipped so far away that the only hope will be generational change to fix the issues brought about in just the last decade or two of history.
Anyway, here’s the stream.
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