Blog 4 - The Most Overrated Holiday of the Year

Michael Hsu

7/6/19

Entry #4

I’ve never really celebrated Fourth of July. It never felt like a holiday to truly celebrate. Even before I truly knew more about our country’s history, I didn’t look as forward to it as others did.

It is a day where we’re supposed to celebrate the independence from our “colonizer”, which was the UK, and we’re supposed to feel patriotic, and in some ways, appreciative of this country. Coming from an immigrant family, part of me have this sense that I need to feel appreciated that I am in the US, and that my family immigrated to the US to seek a better life for our family, which is true. However, the more I learn about this country’s history, the less I feel inclined to celebrate on the Fourth of July.

We hear it over and over again that this country was built by immigrants, but it’s almost like we forget and even ignore how this country was initially “built” by igniting the genocide of indigenous folks and slavery of those of African descent. Treaties with indigenous tribes were negotiated, then later on, broken. Jim Crow segregation, lynching, mass incarceration, the War on Drugs affecting black communities all across this country.

In addition, Chinese folks were lynched. Japanese Americans were placed into concentration camps. Many people from all across the world came to the US as refugees, because we can’t help ourselves but to continuously go to war with other countries. After Jewish folks went through the Holocaust, and Palestinians are currently living in a virtual open-air prison, today, we see folks, many from Central American countries, being placed in modern day concentration camps in the United States.

This is why I can’t celebrate on the Fourth of July, let alone “Independence Day”, because many people in this country has not experienced independence themselves. The Fourth of July is arguably the most overrated holiday every year. We basically said, “We’ll fight to become free from our colonizers, so that way, we can become the colonizers ourselves!” Greed and power ruled the day, and it still does.

I previously haven’t given much thought on whether Fourth of July should be a holiday at all. However, thinking about it right now, it shouldn’t be. What is there to celebrate? Beating the UK in a war?  

It’s fitting that DC was raining on the Fourth of July. Maybe Mother Earth was trying to send us a message. I’m going to leave it up to you to decide what that message was.