It’s a beautiful July 4 and I am finishing my meager breakfast in the backyard, puzzling over the Friday NYT puzzle that Rex Parker (you look at his daily site?) calls “easy”, and almost forgetting that I have a blog post to write.

The picture is of the river birch we planted about 40 years ago. It’s hard for me to convey its size and beauty in a photo. Let’s try this.

Better?

Trump’s BBB will soon be the law of the land, and we will see how that plays out. No further comment right now.

But for many, passage of that bill diminishes the July 4 holiday. And I understand that, of course, but it is also important to know that our history is far from pristine.

Today, it is hard to conceive of slavery in this country, existing decades after it had been outlawed in virtually all of the then advanced world. And that its eradication took 600,000 lives to accomplish.

It’s perhaps less hard to imagine the segregationist laws and practice that quickly followed, laws so harsh that Adolf Hitler could use them as a model for Nazi race laws.

Yes, we have overcome the worst of all that, but so many Black Americans, for all sorts of reasons, still form a pervasive economic and social underclass. And those Americans who have worked so hard to help this underclass gain parity have been temporarily stopped in their tracks by the Trump administration. It started with the demeaning of the “1619 Project” and continued into making any attempt to foster Diversity, Equity, or Inclusion a virtual federal crime.

Estimates of the population of the current United States before the Europeans landed here are only estimates, and they seem to range from 2 to 18 million

We may not ever be able to be more precise than that, but we can be fairly precise in concluding that by 1900, that number had been reduced to 200,000.  And even today, decades after the end of patent governmental land grabs, the majority of this population forms an economic underclass.

None of this, plus elements of our history that include Chinese exclusion, Japanese interment, anti-Jewish, anti-Irish and anti-Italian discrimination among other things, can make us proud.

But progress, and a lot of it, has been made. That is, until the Trump administration and its implementation of Project 2025 called a halt to progress on these fronts and determined to turn the clock back.

The concept of American Exceptionalism (which was always suspicious) was based not only on our GDP and military prowess, but on our continual attempts to better ourselves, our capacity to serve as a model for much of the rest of the world, and for our willingness to share our good fortune with others. No longer is that the case. No linger can we claim any form of exceptionalism. We now show ourselves for what the Trump administration has made us (or perhaps for what we always on the whole have been, leading to our creation of the Trump administration): heartless, greedy, and self defeating, with absolutle no concern for those who reside elsewhere, and no concern for many who reside here.

It is Independence Day. Is it a day to celebrate? Or a day to take stock of ourselves? Sometimes, it is hard to do both at the same time.

[I am late with this today. No proofreading. It’s a holiday.]