Rocket's Red Glare: How Will Texans Spend This 4th Of July?

DALLAS, TX —This weekend, we'll celebrate Independence Day in ways we never have.

In Dallas, that means barbecues, a slip 'n' slide for the kids and Lone Star on ice for the adults. It also means tamales, backyard piñatas and margaritas the way only Texans can make them.

But, after what's happened to America in the last year with the pandemic, the BLM protests and the insurrection, it's also a good time to take stock of who we are, and who we want to become as citizens.

Some would say we're more divided than we've been since the 1960s, when the nation was torn apart over an unpopular war, civil rights, assassinations and gaps between young and old and rich and poor.

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There were right-wing groups that challenged whether you were an American if you didn't want to go to Vietnam. There were also fringe elements on the left who thought it was acceptable to loot and set fire to public and private property to make a point.

But today is different. It's now become commonplace to assert that a legislator is "a Communist" as Marjorie Taylor Greene called Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a few days ago. "Not American," sniffed Greene.

Our American motto has always been "E Pluribus Unum," meaning, "Out of many, one." But the space to make that happen, the reason for our towering presence on the world stage for more than a century, is shrinking daily because we can't even talk to each other.

What is the endgame here? "Now we are engaged in a great civil war," Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg, "testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."

The test we're facing may have a 2.0 battlefield, but it's the same test: Rodney King put it well after his LA beatdown in 1992: "Can't we all just get along?" This time, the battlefield isn't the North vs. the South. Largely, the schism is urban vs. rural.

This July 4th, America is trying to shake off its collective PTSD. Over the last 15 months, we've seen the best and the worst that we have to offer one another. We've seen front line responders sacrifice their lives to save others in the pandemic, and we've seen armed and masked unidentified militia men drag people from the street to ... no one knows where.

We've seen science and medicine create a modern miracle in developing effective vaccines in record time, and we've seen people who call themselves "patriots" parade a Confederate battle flag into the nation's Capitol, kill a police officer and threaten to lynch the sitting Vice President of the United States.

Where does it end? In Texas yesterday, there was a shameless display of labeling illegal border crossers as criminals and nothing more, while no practical solutions were even mentioned other than a higher, sturdier, more formidable wall.

Texans live in a state that, through gerrymandering, no longer represents its population. And as a result, those elected through such an undemocratic process feel no need to represent the entire state, only their supporters.

Those politicians believe their constituency wants more guns on the street, no school lessons about how American might not be infallible, and tighter controls on who gets to vote and how and what women can do with their bodies. And this should all be done while reducing taxes.

Well, you cut taxes enough and you eventually get to zero. When you force women to have babies they cannot afford, they often become a financial burden on the state. And eventually, if one group is able to keep the levers of power in their control at the expense of everyone else, that system becomes as hard to sustain as it is to justify in a democracy where all men are supposedly created equal.

Consider this: there are still members of The Greatest Generation alive. They weathered the Great Depression, beat back fascism abroad, split the atom, created the interstate highway system, defeated polio and put human beings on the moon. And they did it by sharing inspiration, ideas and learning to cooperate. As someone once wisely said, "If two people in a room share exactly the same ideas, one of them is unnecessary."

It's worth considering. If we can find a way to just listen to one another again, America could find its way back to fulfilling its true potential. Lincoln knew then what would happen if we could not.

"A house divided against itself," he warned, "cannot stand."

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