July 4, 2025

By Steve Edington

It’s a beautiful day here in my part of New England, coming as it does after several days of very high heat and humidity. I’ll do some yard work later today and then take a walk. My walk will be through a wooded area not far from my New Hampshire home with a path that goes alongside the Merrimack River. As I go along, I’ll be recalling some words from the opening paragraph of Jack Kerouac’s first novel, The Town and the City, about how “The Merrimack River, broad and placid, flows down from the New Hampshire hills.”

There is a sad irony for me in today’s beauty as it is found in the part of America where I live. It stands in contrast to the ugliness that is in much of our country’s socio-political life right now. This is what makes my observance of today’s 2025 Independence Day—July the Fourth—such a subdued one.

Yesterday the United States Congress passed a bill that will curtail, and in some cases end. the health care provisions for millions of Americans—many of whom actually voted for the President who will sign it—while granting even larger tax breaks for those who already have more money than they could possibly spend in two dozen lifetimes.

Then we have had the creation of a secret police force, with the acronym of ICE, that indiscriminately rounds up immigrants—whatever their legal status may be—for incarceration; their due process notwithstanding. And I use the term “secret police” in the most literal sense since these agents of the US Government do not even show their faces.

The latest chapter in this travesty is the practically overnight construction of what amounts to a concentration camp in the Florida Everglades to help house the rounded-up immigrants, who might (might?) get their due process, but only after their open-ended incarceration. The President has joked about how any who try to escape from this facility could be eaten by alligators—all to the laughter and delight of his millions of minions.

I’ll leave it at that when it comes to all that weighs on my mind on this Independence Day.

Twelve years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which is what today’s celebration is about, the new nation that the document heralded enacted the Constitution of the United States. Its key component was the principle of the Separation of Powers, with three supposedly co-equal areas of governance that would check and balance each other. One of the reasons the authors of the Constitution put this framework in place was their concern about the possibility of a rogue Chief Executive with monarchial aspirations. That concern has now been well recognized in the person of Donald Trump.

What the Framers apparently did not anticipate, however, was the subservience of the Legislative and Judicial branches of government to the Executive. While it is far from unanimous when it comes to their make-up, as they are now constituted the US Congress and the Supreme Court have largely made themselves to be extensions of Trump’s Executive Branch.

The Declaration of Independence was, in good measure, a response to the tyranny of England’s King George the Third as it was seen and experienced by many of the American colonists. The document contains line after line that specifically reiterate his offenses. Now, 249 years after the signing of this Declaration, we have a President who aspires to be the very kind of monarch from whom we declared our independence! And he has just enough—just enough—Congressional legislators and Supreme Court justices to allow him to get away with it.

I’m staying low today when it comes to celebrating July the Fourth. It’s not because I no longer accept the ideals upon which this country was founded—even while knowing all the many ways we’ve fallen short of those ideals. To the contrary, it’s because I still want to believe in those ideals however much they are being violated at the highest levels of the government that is supposed to be upholding them. Instead, this will be my day to recommit myself to doing whatever I can, however modest my efforts may be, in restoring those ideals before they are forever lost.

I closed my last blog here with references to Woody Guthrie and my aforementioned Jack Kerouac. I’ll do the same with this one. I still believe in Jack’s America of “all that raw land, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it.” I still believe in Woody’s “ribbon of highway” with its “endless skyway and golden valleys.” On this Fourth of July of 2025, I know they are still there and still worth standing up and fighting for.

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Steve Edington is a retired Unitarian Universalist minister and the Minister Emeritus of the UU Church of Nashua, New Hampshire. He is a 30 year member, and a past President, of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac.