"Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation" -Alasdair Gray

Because although these are the painful final days of the halfway-decent nation we once knew, they're also the early days of the better nation we finally can become – if we don't surrender hope. If we work for it.

The United States is dead. Long live the United States.

This is the best #FourthOfJuly thread. The best one. If you're demoralized (and who isn't?), please please read this bracing tonic from @sarahtaber for your own sake:
https://mastodon.online/@sarahtaber/114797147296327900

good morning Americans

if you wish to engrave something upon your heart, first inscribe it with your hands and profess it with your voice.

#calligraphy #handwriting #fourthofjuly #july4th

(long text warning) Two sheets of cursive brush calligraphy in metallic ink reading: 

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, AT THIS VERY HOUR.

Frederick Douglass
1852
(long text warning) Two sheets of cursive brush calligraphy in metallic ink reading: What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, AT THIS VERY HOUR. Frederick Douglass 1852

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#FourthOfJuly
I don't talk much about the damage the #Colonization of North America and the subsequent #Independence of the #UnitedStates has done to my personal family. And I probably never will, but it has been substantial, even to this very day.

Certainly I confront what the land and resources theft, what the genocide and enslavement of millions of people has done to my people more than my mother or grandmother, who were much more shell shocked than I am.
#Native#Indigenous

jbz
jbz boosted
#PPOD: Astronomers combined observations from three different observatories to produce this colorful, multiwavelength image of the intricate remains of Supernova 1987A. The central structure visible inside the ring in the Hubble image has now grown to roughly half a light-year across. Most noticeable are two blobs of debris in the center of the supernova remnant racing away from each other at approximately 20 million miles per hour.

#science #space #fourthofjuly