When I was a child, the 4th of July was special. The earliest memory I have of living in the town I would spend most of my childhood is the celebration of what they called “old home day”. It was a little town called Carlisle, nestled up next to Concord Massachusetts and just a few miles from Lexington. It’s a town whose roots trace back through and before the shot heard round the world, and event that happened mere miles from my high school where the school team was the “patriots”.

There were charming old timey traditions. Foot races, a cake walk, a parade loaded with veterans of wars fought as far back as the First World War, (a float that sadly shrank every year).

We all went. I ate cotton candy. I won cakes and played on the playground and the town green. I naively tried to run in some of the foot races and did very poorly every time. (I’ve never been bunch of an athlete, even in my youth).

Everywhere I’ve lived since I have compared the celebrations of Independence Day to those of my youth. They never compared. Even so, those memories kept the 4th special all this time.

This year I no longer wish to celebrate. This year that same country born on the fourth of July has made clear its hatred and disdain for my existence. It’s made clear that it means to crown the same sort of insane king we fought to escape. It’s made clear that there is no separation of church and state, or even the freedom to practice unless you are a Christian and of a variety "acceptable" those who gave used it as a crowbar to gain entrance to our government.

The country I loved and celebrated is sick. I will not celebrate the birth of a wasting body dying slowly in a hospital bed as vultures tear it apart.

I’m going to morn the dream that was. I’m going to hope against hope for sanity and a miracle recovery as the “doctors” in charge of the United States pump it full of more and more poison from the top down.

I weep at the feet of the cancerous vessel we have become.  I dare to hope I don’t spend the next 4th writing a eulogy to a country I once loved driven to senility and death by a mad man gilded in fool's gold and filled with nothing but human detritus, the power hungry madmen propping him up to their own ends and the fools who let the hatred of their fellow man drag them along for the ride.