A laugh-at horror for the times, dark humor biting in the dark (h/t tweet the great Miss Cellania this morning):

We’re gonna need a bigger boat?#OwlKitty #Jaws #July4th #SharkWeek pic.twitter.com/ppLQ9wh91e

— OwlKitty (@Owl__Kitty) July 4, 2021

Here we are, a celebration Sunday — the fourth of July, Independence Day, the federal holiday tomorrow — and it’s fairly nice here in California’s Central Valley, with a not-so-warm breeze and temperatures in the mid-80s, supposedly heading today to a high under triple-digits, a rarity for a while.

Unlike a lot of American holidays, this one is pure history. On this date 245 years ago, delegates from the 13 colonies adopted the Declaration of Independence, two days after they’d voted to break-away from Britian. They knew what they were doing, and apparently knew it could be successful — origin story from HISTORY:

On July 2nd, the Continental Congress voted in favor of Lee’s resolution for independence in a near-unanimous vote (the New York delegation abstained, but later voted affirmatively).
On that day, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail that July 2 “will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival” and that the celebration should include “Pomp and Parade…Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other.”

On July 4th, the Continental Congress formally adopted the Declaration of Independence, which had been written largely by Jefferson.
Though the vote for actual independence took place on July 2nd, from then on the 4th became the day that was celebrated as the birth of American independence.

Adams missed the reality of the impact of the fourth of July — the actual signing. And the holiday comes at a time when history, American history, hits the real facts too hard for assholes who are scared of the real-side of actual history. A way-fine example is what happened last Thursday in Texas — a promotional event for a book on how slavery played a role in the much-highly-praised Battle of The Alamo was abruptly cancelled by Republican historical fright-babies.
The story at The Texas Tribune, which includes this bit:

“Just as the site of the Alamo was left in ruins for decades, its story was forgotten and twisted over time, with the contributions of Tejanos — Texans of Mexican origin, who fought alongside the Anglo rebels — scrubbed from the record, and the origin of the conflict over Mexico’s push to abolish slavery papered over,” reads a description of the book by its publisher.
“As uncomfortable as it may be to hear for some, celebrating the Alamo has long had an echo of celebrating whiteness.”

The book, “Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth,” has ‘received mostly positive reviews, including from The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, with a consensus that it builds on widely accepted academic research.‘

Once again, for emphasis, it’s just reality!
And that reality in history is what fuels the idiotic CRT madness instigated by Republicans all across the country — read a good, most-interesting piece at Vox last month — anti-racism being taught to white students, which offends the  sensibilities of MAGA hatters and GQPer assholes. CRT is just a long-time academic treatise on how racism is so-embedded in American culture, and some are scared of facing that fact.

Another couple of racist history-day examples came this morning from Erik Loomis at LGM — one dealing with slavery, and the other concerned consequences off that second US horrid-history subject, genocide of Native-Americans.
In the first, Loomis links to a piece Friday at The Washington Post on slavery and the beginnings of the Revolutionary War, including this snip:

Whites’ fury at the British for casting their lot with enslaved people drove many to the fateful step of endorsing independence.
In his rough draft of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson listed 25 grievances against George III but devoted three times as many words to one of those grievances as to any other.
This was his claim that the king had first imposed enslaved Africans on White Americans and was now encouraging those same enslaved people “to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them.”

Soon after the adoption of the Declaration, Black freedom fighters set about transforming its meaning.

‘Give me liberty to enslave…’ or words to that effect.
And in the second post, Loomis links to The LA Times from last week on the horrific living situation with Native Americans, inluding an update on long-range results of genocidal tendencies:

The nonprofit U.S. Water Alliance says 58 out of every 1,000 Native American households don’t have access to indoor plumbing.
Many Native Americans don’t have access to clean water because of faulty, outdated or nonexistent pipes or water systems or other problems that result in residents resorting to bottled water or boiled water, which kills viruses, bacteria and parasites.

Welcome to America — how you see this holiday really depends on your skin color.
And for African-Americans, most-likely Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech correctly pointed out the ‘sacrilegious irony’ of it all:

The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me.
The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me.
This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.
Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?

Reality is real…

(Illustration out front: M.C Escher’s ‘Scholastica,’ found here)