The roots leading to and the founding of the United States of America are riddled with inaccuracies and myths to fit the concepts of what Americans claim to hold dear. It begins with Christopher Columbus and how he was hailed as a “hero” for finding the “New World.” The world was not new and had been inhabited by indigenous peoples for centuries. One of the biggest boosts to the myths was spawned with the Puritans coming to the Colonies in pursuit of religious “freedom”: however, that freedom was only for themselves. They lacked tolerance and kindness toward anyone who disagreed with their brand of faith.

As you all know, the Colonies broke away from England to establish a country to “establish justice,” prominently stated in the Preamble to the US Constitution. The Preamble also states, “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." Later, the Pledge of Allegiance echoed this sentiment: “with justice and liberty for all.”

Even taking “men” as a general, outdated, sexist term for all humankind, these proclamations are a lie and applied to rich white men. If you had money or the wherewithal to gain it, your life was better ensured, your liberty extended to the right to vote and speak your mind, and pursuing happiness was at your discretion. Women and people of color were not created equal, were denied their “rights” (which means that they were really “privileges” and privileges extended to white men), and the happiness of women and people of color was dependent on the white men who oversaw them as wives, slaves, and oppressed minorities.

If a person’s religion was not mainstream, he/she also suffered although the Constitution ostensibly guarantees freedom of religion; it seems that the freedom to choose consisted of Column A or Column B of Protestantism. Thomas Jefferson writes, “But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god” (https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/jeffersons-religious-beliefs), but that is seldom “advertised” when fundies discuss the religious beliefs of the Founding Fathers.

Over the decades and centuries, these ideas were challenged and the challenges resulted in the Civil War and amendments to the Constitution that allowed women and people of color to vote. The legal changes did not change social and cultural conventions, however, and women, people of color, and poor people continued to be second class citizens.

In recent times, I thought we were working toward equilibrium; now, I fear that we will lose any gains we have made.

I love America. My Irish ancestors immigrated to the colonies in the 1730s. My seventh great grandfather fought in the Revolutionary War. While the Constitution did not originally mean freedom for all, many people were working to toward making the incomplete ideal the complete ideal.

Happy Birthday, America. You are too old to still be feeling the pangs that accompanied your birth, and I fear that your old age will be fraught with fear, division, and the destruction of the even limited ideals that started the grand experiment.