Dear Nephew,

Well, Nephew, this is some 4th of July. For the first time in my life, I’m skipping Purview’s fireworks. Not that I’m old, crotchety, and feeble, rather I’m truly, sadly disheartened.

Nephew, as we celebrate our independence and freedom, our ruling party aims to ensure its dominance by harnessing its future to fundamental religious groups often at odds with the majority of us “sinners.”

For them, we’re too liberal or the wrong color or not straight eough. We smoke or we drink or we gamble or worse yet we’re not truly Christian as we practice some unfortunate, misdirected, faith different from theirs.

The success of our War on Terror and the comfort of our Homeland Security are belied by our fears a terrorist will blast us before our fireworks go off or will spray us with toxins while we watch them.

Nor can we celebrate Iraq’s liberation when select corporations siphon into their coffers its resources, its wealth, and our taxpayers' dollars. Nor can we can celebrate a shaky new government coping with nearby insurgent Falluja, a city we frantically handed the enemy when our resolve to succeed seemed unwise.

Nor can we celebrate our allies, over whom we’ve rode roughshod to war, whose councils we’ve ignored, and whose treaties we’ve scrapped or refused.

In a world needing rule of law, we’ve declared ourselves above the law, then violated international law, and wretchedly depicted that violation to the world. We’ve deceived the UN abominably, and dismissed international tribunals highhandedly.

Our ruling party has taken the pledge of “indivisible” and intensified, for political gain, divisions between rich and poor, young and old, gay and straight, liberal and conservative. It has turned “liberty and justice for all” into “liberty and justice through the grace of a President who's sees himself above the law and has appointed the lackys to prove it.”

But, Nephew, the Statue of Liberty still stands in New York Harbor. Though an embarrassing reminder of what we once were, I hope she’s a symbol of what we again may become.

Yours Truly,
Great Aunt Maggie Pye