I love the Fourth of July, but this will be the first Independence Day in my life that will leave me disheartened and sad.

In the past, this was a day to celebrate. After all, it was the day this country declared its liberation from the British Empire and embarked on a long and bloody war for independence.

Yes, I will fly the American flag as I always do on the 4^th of July. I may even listen to patriotic music if I can find any on TV or radio. And of course, there are the fireworks displays at night—though they may have been canceled because here in California, showing overt patriotism is considered inhospitable and hostile to the state’s millions of aliens who are in the United States unlawfully.

Patriotism and celebrating the founding of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world just doesn’t seem the same in our nation today—not with thousands of anarchists, socialists, communists, Antifa thugs, Black Lives Matter miscreants, and other America haters infesting city streets, defacing statues and monuments, and generally attacking anybody who opposes them.

This is not the America I know and love. This is an unfamiliar, alien world where the values I grew up with are being trashed; where hatred has replaced civility; where identity politics and tribalism have supplanted the idea of one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.

E Pluribus Unum (Out of many, one) apparently is no longer the motto of this strange new world. Instead, it is divide and conquer, and acquire political power at any cost—even if it means blowing up the Senate by eliminating the filibuster and packing the Supreme Court to ensure the nation continues its relentless march toward socialism.

I recall the “burn, baby burn,” mantra of hippy-dippy anti-Vietnam War demonstrators in the 1960s, and the clashes with police during the 1968 Democrat Party Convention in Chicago. The Weather Underground and other radical groups were embarked on a campaign of bombing against “Amerika.” In California alone, twenty explosions a week rocked the state during the summer of 1970.

I was a newly minted reporter for the Chicago Tribune at the time and I thought the country was coming apart at the seams.

There were clashes between the so-called “establishment” and the self-appointed “revolutionaries” who were rebelling against their parents, “the man,” and anybody over 30.

As Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion and publisher of Encounter Books wrote recently:

“A counterculture has really triumphed when it ceases to encounter significant resistance when its values seem not merely victorious but inevitable. America’s cultural revolution, launched in the late 1960s and never quite stopped, has always been a Janus-faced phenomenon. One face was the Boomers’ euphoric hedonism and disregard for the moral guardrails of tradition and authority — the “revolution” of easy sex and relentlessly bad taste that now defines our aesthetics and cultural arrangements.

“The other face was dour and vicious, masking a raw hunger for power under a preening moralism. This side of the revolution could be detected in many countercultural phenomena, not least the juvenile activism and noisy readiness for violence that were such conspicuous features of the age.”

Today, the vicious leftist radicalism of the 1960s has returned in spades to an apathetic America as the obsequious liberal establishment cow-tows before the BLM and Antifa rabble in a sickening display of irrational and foolish white mea culpa.

Not me. I abandoned the freewheeling liberal dogma of the left decades ago when I recognized what its unfeigned plans were.

It was not about reforming the government. It was about ripping it down and replacing it with a hybrid brand of Marxist-Leninism, otherwise known as “Democratic-Socialism.”

Sorry, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Sandy Cortez, and other members of the Congressional leftist aristocracy. Your brand of rose-tinted Communism is not for me.

I still believe the founding fathers of this country had it right in 1776, when, in the Declaration of Independence, they wrote:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

They followed that up in 1789 by ratifying The U.S. Constitution and then adding to it the first 10 Amendments to that document, otherwise known as the Bill of Rights.

Those rights guarantee, among other things, freedom of speech, religion, and the right to bear arms—all of which are currently under ferocious attack by the leftist hordes.

If the radicals and thugs currently infesting our city streets are successful in abolishing the nation’s police forces via their campaign of civil obliteration and lawlessness, they will have accomplished what none of our enemies were able to accomplish in all of the wars we have fought.

They will have engendered chaos and conflict in America with the willing assistance of thousands of imbecilic elected officials who are inexplicably surrendering to the mob.

What’s next? The public guillotining of “enemies of the state,” also known as Republicans, conservatives, Christians, the police, Jews, Libertarians, capitalists, pro-lifers, veterans, and patriotic Americans?

As Don McLean sang: “Bye, bye Miss American Pie . . . . That’ll be the day that I die.”   

 

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