Fourth of July. Posting on a Friday. This is a holiday post. This post is to celebrate the independence of the United States from the British crown. This land used to be under the governance of a monarch, and it didn’t work out, so the people who lived here kicked the crown out by force.
Power was abused, people were abused. People got fed up. They talked about being fed up, and decided they didn’t like it. They decided to do something about it. Their feelings weren’t brand new. Their problems weren’t brand new. Indeed, they turned around and did some of the same bad things to others, mostly people they called slaves, but also to poor people, and to natives, and women and children and so on.
Eventually people got fed up with the people doing it to slaves, what had been done to the people that started this nation. Not to the poor people, because they still did it to the poor people themselves. But to the slaves, they didn’t have slaves anymore, so it fed them up.
That started another violent action, the disagreement over doing many of the same things that had made the founders get mad at the monarchy. Abusing power, abusing people. And again, justice prevailed. The abusers got what was coming to them. Not the abusers of the poor, though. Just the ones abusing the people they called slaves.
And this cycle repeats itself. People get abused, get fed up, give the abusers what’s coming to them, and then turn around and keep abusing some other people who have not yet asserted themselves.
Today there are still many abuses and many abusers. There is a lot to be fed up about. But what we celebrate today is that we seem to have made a system where we get better about giving the abusers what’s coming to them faster and with greater precision than ever before.
At this rate, we will hopefully be done with systemic abuse one day. That’s something we can all look forward to and work toward.