Among the many reflections on the celebration of freedom in the form of independence, I am paused when it measures for some in comparative deficiency.

I, like many others, indentured my patriotism to service, of which I am proud, and think it neither wasted nor frivolous — defending the American republic and her freedom at home and abroad. Yet it’s the festering wound of supremacy, the desire to subjugate her own people, that works like a worm inside the apple — eating its own shelter.

_{…mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. —Declaration of Independence, 1776.}

Freedom in any nation must be shared across all of its parts, all equal, and the diversity of its people makes that freedom more cohesive, not less. America’s independence did not come simply from her bold claim against an oppression she felt from a king; it was made possible by an oppression she imposed — plantations filled with the diversity of the world, worked by the indentured and enslaved. Two hundred and fifty years of survival rest on the shoulders of that gruesome engine, and still the nation fights the very thing that built her. What makes her great is not her ugly parts; those should never be hidden, for her future depends on understanding them. Her greatness is the times she looked at her own tyranny and chose her people instead. Freedom must be for all, and until it is, the nation continues to enslave itself.

— Freedom cannot be tiered, nor clutched in the fetters of supremacy, and still call itself free.