The Fourth

Photo credit: Library of Congress

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

The Fourth

It was July 4, 1981, and I drove around a rotary in Narragansett, Rhode Island. On the car radio, the DJ almost seemed to plead in her delivery about the country still being ours, that we had to act, and that saving the nation from Reaganism was foremost in her mind. The antiwar movement from the Vietnam War was not quite in the rearview mirror of history. Now, it’s almost vanished.

Reaganism has come to fruition with Trump. Expanded militarism, now on our streets in the presence of heavily armed and anonymous shock troops of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Reagan began the juggernaut of expanded wars in Central America and attacks against the federal government, but that was early in the right-wing move that gave us, or ushered in, the supreme ugliness that is Trump! Reagan underwrote the military gangs of thugs, many trained in the US, who brought terror to the streets and countryside of El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and beyond.

According to ABC, ICE has already arrested over 95,000 immigrants. That’s five months of arrests. Imagine what they can do in four years. ICE travels to businesses, apartments, farms, and elsewhere to snare those in their sights, and overwhelmingly those people are of color and of Latino background. Immigrants with criminal convictions made up 30% of ICE arrests, 26% of those arrested had pending criminal charges, and 44% “had no criminal history.” That means many people who have been shipped off to dark sites had the absolute right to petition the courts for a number of reasons. Deportation to El Salvador meant concentration-like conditions and likely mistreatment and torture.

I don’t think that most care about issues of war and peace and empire anymore. Seymour Hersh has an excellent piece at his Substack (July 4, 2025) that reports how the US attack on Iran put their nuclear program back years. The damage done by US bunker-buster bombs, weighing tens of thousands of pounds, and missiles launched from submarines has caused Iran’s fuel enrichment program significant damage, something reported inaccurately by major media sources such as CNN and MSNBC. That probably means that Israel can go on committing genocide in Gaza, and the US will continue to bankroll Israel with bombs and big bucks. But good nutrition for kids? Where did some in the US ever get the idea that the latter was a good idea? And few in the US care if people in other countries are wounded or killed by the actions of the US and its allies.

None of this needs to interfere with plans to celebrate the Fourth. When living within the walls of an empire, nothing on the outside, or what’s done in your name or through the use of your taxes, ought to make the slightest difference in your behavior. It’s all good, as the cliché goes.