Fourth of July is upon us

For the national holiday, give a listen to Erudite Partner being interviewed by Bill Moyers. For all the horror of the omni-crisis -- white supremacy, coronavirus, apparent economic Depression, Trump and the GOPers -- neither of them is disheartened.

This is what my students have said over and over again is, “We don’t want to go back to normal. We don’t want the country to go back to the way it was before. This is a time when we need to rethink everything.” And I think that we are at a time when the combination of the pandemic and what’s looking to be a very, very deep recession and the Black Lives Matter movement. Those three taken together create an opportunity to talk about, what would it look like to do things genuinely differently?

And, of course, it’s not gonna be perfect and it may turn out to be incremental and it may not be what one would hope for. But I feel like this is the first time in a very long time that you see people, you know, serious journalists asking about, you know, “Couldn’t things be genuinely, radically different?”

... BILL MOYERS: How are you gonna advise [your students] to celebrate the Fourth of July?

REBECCA GORDON: I might tell them to read Frederick Douglass’s famous address about the Fourth of July in which he argues that this is nothing for him and his people to celebrate.

What I am trying to do is educate people to believe that it is important to be citizens. Citizens of the country they live in, but also citizens of the world. And that if they want to spend their Fourth of July thinking about, “What does it mean to me to be a citizen? What do I have to think about? How do I have to act?” I think that’s a great way to celebrate the Fourth of July.

Let the celebrations begin -- without crowds or probably fireworks.