America: The Best and Worst of Everything

We are both the Gettysburg Address and the Trail of Tears; both Ellis Island and ICE raids; both Duke Ellington and Kid Rock.

Photo by Lee Lawson on Unsplash

It’s the 4th of July, ¼ of the way through the 21st Century.

If you're American, Happy Independence from England

If you're Canadian, Happy Codependence w/England

If you're England-please take us back.

Because this week, the Republican budget passed — a nearly 900-page hate letter to the American people. A legislative death sentence for clean energy, poor children, nursing home residents, and anyone who’s ever been sick, hungry, or not a billionaire.

It cuts Medicaid by a trillion dollars, so 12 million Americans will almost certainly lose health care. And then it gives $975 billion in tax breaks to the rich - who do not need tax breaks - because nothing says “fiscal responsibility” like murdering grandma so the elite can experience more comfort, and buy more Congressmen.

Satan’s Grocery List also gives billions to ICE to detain immigrant parents with their American kids, eliminates student loan programs, defunds clean energy, throws 600 nursing homes into crisis, and still manages to add nearly $4 trillion in new debt.

Now, 2025 was already feeling like a brutal satire written by some coked-up AI with abandonment issues.   Recent headlines have read like Mad Libs for fascists.

• “President sues CBS for $20 million & pretends to be mad over a 60 Minutes interview to facilitate a corporate merger bribe”

• “ICE to begin detaining American children to promote family unity.”

• “Christian Congressmen cheer gutting of USAID; collectively wag dicks at Jesus.”

Throw in stochastic terrorism, National Guard deployments over protests, kidnapping people off the street for free speech and a president who claims to care about antisemitism while pardoning the “Camp Aushwitz” guy & calling bankers “Shylocks.”

It’s depressing. 

It’s like Ingmar Bergman directing the Star Wars prequels.

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But here’s the other side.

This is nothing new. 

America is - and has always been - the best and worst of humanity, both turned up to 11.  We are both the light and the shadow.

This country has always been a violent & hopeful contradiction.   We were founded by men who wanted freedom for themselves, while owning other humans.    

The same document that says “all men are created equal” also uses the phrase “merciless Indian savages.”

We split in two to protect slavery — and then bled ourselves to death trying to end it. 

We had Jim Crow... and we had Rosa Parks. We had George Wallace blocking a schoolhouse door... and we had John Lewis walking across a bridge to stop him.

We’re the country that gave women the vote — after arresting and torturing them for demanding it. We’re the country that said “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and then, twenty years later, finally said “I now pronounce you worthy of being married.”

We are both “give me your tired, your poor” and “go back where you came from.”

And in 2025, we inaugurated a racist on MLK’s holiday.

That's the American story. We make progress — and the reactionaries claw it back.

We are slavery — and the abolitionist movement.

We are segregation - and we’re the Civil Rights movement.

We are lynch mobs - and Ida B. Wells.

We are the exploitation of workers by robber barons - and we’re organized labor.

We are the homophobic cops throwing the first punches - and we’re the Stonewall uprising.

We are both the Gettysburg Address and the Trail of Tears.

We Ellis Island and ICE raids.

America gave the world both Duke Ellington and Kid Rock. 

It’s the best and worst of everything.

America’s not just one thing. It is a battle. It’s a tug-of-war; a slow-motion identity crisis. A permanent identity crisis with racism, fear and over 100 guns for each human.

And every generation gets to decide: Which America are you going to serve?

The one that weaponizes fear? Or the one that marches toward justice, however slowly, and never perfectly, and usually punching itself in the face more than it needs to?

Every generation has the option to join the cruelty or resist it. And today, the choice isn’t between love-it-or-leave-it. The choice is love it and fight for it, or let the worst people define it forever. The only thing that tips the scale is us.

The selfish, reactionary, xenophobic, mean, and easily misled among us will always show up to fight for themselves. The question is whether the rest of us will show up to fight for all of us.

We get to choose — again and again — to be the country that we pretend to be in car commercials.