Oh see, can you say?
I pledge allegiance to the land.
On Independence Day, they ring the church bells. I can hear their brass pulse as I sit on my stoop, wood eaten away by tiny ants and more than a century of rain. The fireworks pop in the neighborhood streets, even though Mama earth is raining on America’s parade around here, where official firework shows were cancelled.
The first fireworks I heard a few weeks back, I texted my boyfriend, who is currently touring with his noise project, PCRV.
“I just heard gunshots. I’m serious, it wasn’t like fireworks.” Now, I know. It was like fireworks.
We live on a well-lit street. Last week the city painted the fire hydrant in front of our house an even brighter red. I am a freckled cis white woman who isn’t afraid to take up space. I am safe. So why am I so scared to say something?
As I listen to all these explosions around me, these bright flashes of yellow light striking the windows, I think to myself, if someone came by with a rifle and asked who I voted for, I would have to lie. Lie in that bed or lie in that grave.
Then I wonder, do I spend too much time with information? It seems more likely than ever to be living around militant behavior, if not direct violations of human rights. Humans are being slaughtered globally, and here in America, we never stopped killing people. Starving people, stealing people, selling people, exploiting people, incarcerating people, building profit from pain and suffering. People are dying in American detention centers, are being tortured in foreign countries in the United State’s continued slave trade, and are being shot in Gaza with American money while seeking food assistance from nonprofits set up to lure people to slaughter.
I collect text like objects, and I try to remember that all this has been happening for a very long time, but we didn’t have it live-streamed. People have been butchered across this land for generations. The American Genocide stains this day of freedom. The Mother still remembers that spilling of blood, her rivers held the bodies, washed the hands, and still, we bring our babies to her waters. Hold their hands as they step into her cool embrace.
It feels like end of times — not in a hyperbolic way, but in the way that it is obvious that humans are getting increasingly hot, are having to move and are being killed in rapid ways due to changing climates and hostile human responses to the feeling of having fewer and fewer resources.
As I type, firecrackers pop in rapid succession while the thunderstorms roll out. The bombs keep bursting, sparkling over U.S. skies, but elsewhere in the name of freedom we murder people. Every day, we move that war machine forward. Everyone knows it, can hear the drum that beats to the end of time.
It’s not just uncomfortable anymore, or inconvenient, we are setting ourselves on fire, our own offering to the Mother. Maybe we worshiped the wrong Gods all along. Maybe the Mother always knew she’d betray us (or worse, that we would betray her), and it would be the sun that would finally get to be the star.
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Perfect words for these terrible days. Thank you. ☺️
Back at you, Anna.