Yesterday, on the eve of fireworks and flags, the House passed a bill that will gut basic food benefits as well as Medicaid, stripping up to 17 million people of health coverage. It will defund Planned Parenthood, funnel more money to ICE to carry out mass deportations, and it will eliminate clean energy tax credits in the middle of a climate crisis. While families were preparing for barbecues and fireworks, the government was quietly expanding the architecture of cruelty that keeps millions trapped in cycles of poverty, fear, and exhaustion.
This is not a betrayal of American freedom; it is its fulfillment.
Control By Design
We have been taught to believe that freedom is the birthright of every American, that liberty is the soil in which this country was planted. But the truth is that freedom here has always been conditional, granted only to those deemed deserving by a system designed to extract as much as possible from everyone else. The promise of liberty was written by men who enslaved others, enforced by laws that protected land stolen from Indigenous peoples, and maintained by violence that has been dressed up as patriotism for centuries.
What happened yesterday is not an anomaly; it is the latest iteration of a system that functions exactly as it was designed to. The bill that slashes social programs and expands policing is not about balancing budgets or restoring order. It is about control, about keeping millions of people in survival mode so they remain easy to govern and too tired to resist. It is about ensuring that healthcare, food, and shelter remain privileges you must earn through labor in a system rigged to benefit the wealthy, while those who cannot keep up are left to fall through the cracks.
The Grand Illusion
The United States has always been more invested in the illusion of freedom than in the reality of it. The images of children locked in cages, of families being evicted, of patients rationing insulin, of workers collapsing from heat in fields while billionaires grow richer—these are not accidents but outcomes of policies that keep wealth and power consolidated in the hands of a white few.
In this country, freedom often looks like the freedom to exploit, to dominate, to hoard resources while telling everyone else to pull themselves up by bootstraps they never had to use themselves.
When the government defunds Planned Parenthood, it is about forcing people to carry pregnancies they do not want or cannot afford, ensuring that the next generation enters a world of scarcity and dependency. When it slashes SNAP and Medicaid, it is about telling the poor to starve quietly, to get sick quietly, to die quietly. When it funnels money to ICE, it is about creating a climate of fear among immigrant communities, driving people further into the shadows so they can be more easily exploited for labor without protection or rights. All by design.
And when these decisions are made, they are often wrapped in language about security, prosperity, or freedom, as if those words can disguise the harm being done in their name.
Make America White Again
I keep thinking about the mega-prison in El Salvador and the new detention center built in the Everglades in just eight days, how they are not isolated developments but part of a much larger strategy that many are too exhausted to see clearly.
It’s a strategy designed to protect whiteness and wealth, to ensure that as the demographics of this country shift, the structures of power do not. It is a plan to keep a fearful, shrinking minority in control, using laws and policies to maintain racial and economic hierarchies while pretending it’s about “law and order.”
As Felice Elizabeth wrote, “We have seen this before, in history’s darkest chapters. It always starts the same way: dehumanize, isolate, incite a crowd.” This is how it starts, and it is also how it continues, year after year, disguised under the red, white, and blue.
What Does Freedom Mean?
The Fourth of July tells us to celebrate freedom, to gather around fireworks and hot dogs, to believe that we live in the greatest nation on Earth. But what does freedom mean in a country where millions are one medical bill away from homelessness, where people are denied the right to control their own bodies, where Black and Brown communities live under constant surveillance, where the land itself is poisoned for profit?
What does freedom mean when the air is filled with smoke from climate-fueled wildfires, while politicians slash environmental protections to protect corporate profits? What does freedom mean when children are forced to learn in schools that do not have enough funding to provide lunch, much less a meaningful education? What does freedom mean when your life is determined by the zip code you were born in, when your worth is tied to your productivity, when your dignity is stripped away the moment you can no longer work?
If the Fourth of July is about freedom, it only exists for the few, purchased at the expense of the many.
Everyone’s Asking, What Now?
We can and should reject the narratives that tell us suffering is inevitable. We can create communities of mutual aid where we take care of each other when the state will not. We can organize our workplaces to fight for fair wages and safe conditions. We can show up for immigrants facing deportation, for neighbors facing eviction, for those criminalized for being poor. We can fight for climate justice, reproductive justice, racial justice, economic justice—knowing that none of these struggles are separate. These are not independent; they are inextricably intertwined.
Freedom will not be handed to us by those who profit from our oppression, nor will it be legislated into existence by a government that sees human lives as disposable. Yours too. It will come from us, from the people who are willing to see clearly and act accordingly, who understand that true freedom means collective liberation, not individual survival. Maslow was wrong.
On this Fourth of July, do not celebrate, attend a BBQ or pretend for even a moment longer. Let yourself grieve, let yourself rage, let yourself see the truth, and then let yourself build something better with the people around you.
If the Fourth is a Funeral
If the Fourth is a funeral, let it also be a reckoning. To look inward, take stock of your own silence, complicity, or contribution—and begin to take responsibility.
If the Fourth is a funeral, let it also be a vow: that we will not spend our lives serving an illusion while people suffer and die. That we will not be pacified by flags and fireworks while children starve. That we will not be distracted by myths while the powerful take everything they can from the rest of us.
And. if the Fourth is a funeral, let it also be a birth: the day we stop waiting on the lies we’ve been fed about freedom so that we may start creating real freedom, together.
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