Almost every dog owner I know hates the Fourth of July, particularly in the Mission-Bernal Heights area. There are massive explosions starting early in the day and going very late at night; we’re not talking a few firecrackers here (which is what you get at Chinese New Year). No: It feels like a war zone. I’m just waiting for the Blue Angels to fly overhead.
I get the fun. Kaboom. Been there, done that, many times. But for the puppies, it’s just horrible: They cower, run, hide, shake, piss all over themselves.
And yesterday, it felt particularly bad. Why, right now, in San Francisco, are we celebrating the day that a group of rich white men decided to form a government that allowed them to own Black people, that treated women essentially as property, and that is so fundamentally undemocratic that a majority of the US Senate is elected by a tiny minority of the population and can, and has, blocked much social progress and now has given us a Supreme Court that wants to send us back, yes, to the 1700s?
I’m not terribly excited about that.
The United States Constitution isn’t a democratic document, and our system of government is far less accountable than most other parliamentary democracies.
The Second Amendment, which has given so many deranged people the right to kill others, even during a Fourth of July parade, was designed in part to protect slave owners from a possible rebellion. Now a radical right Supreme Court, made possible only because 18 percent of Americans elect more than half the senators (and because the Electoral College was designed to prevent actual direct democracy), says that right is sacred. But women can’t control their own bodies.
For this, I sat on the floor with a terrified, shaking canine, trying to find a way to console him as he huddled under my desk.
And I am supposed to be proud to be an American? Party on.
