Beloved, we are gathered here today to pay our respects to the United States, which has departed from us. It was so beloved, and now it is surely gone.
We continue to celebrate her birthday on the 4th of July after drinking copious amounts of alcohol at a million backyard barbecues, waving red, white, and blue flags, and removing a finger or two from exploding fireworks at home. There will be a spectacular fireworks display on the National Mall. Some of us will shoot into the air. Some of us will die miles from where someone shot into the air. Few of us will realize or mourn the country’s death: July 1, 2024.
Millions of us are still stuck in the first stage of grief: shock and denial. But just look at the corpse. It was riddled with bullets from multiple mass shootings, amplified by climate change that its leaders denied, and finally brought to a near-death state by a host of cancerous activities that rendered the body politic incapable of functioning. In the end, tragically, the United States died of self-inflicted wounds.
If we are to move forward, we must at least acknowledge this simple truth: The United States of our forefathers is gone. Justice John Roberts wrote the Supreme Court majority opinion that was the final shot fired into the country’s head. That’s right. John Roberts is the equivalent of John Wilkes Booth. From now on, the president of the United States will be immune from prosecution for any “official” act he takes while in office – effectively putting the president above the law. The Supreme Court will be the final arbiter of what constitutes “official” action. That puts the Court in the middle of partisan political wrangling that the Founders did not want it to be involved in. The Court is thus guilty of establishing the very authoritarian system that we stood against in our revolution.
Millions of us are in the second stage of grief in this process; we feel pain and some feel guilt, although at this point most MAGA Party members are feeling joyful that they finally killed democracy.
We are, and remain, a house divided against itself. Mitch McConnell, the Heritage Foundation, Bill Barr, and so-called conservative Christians celebrate death as if the death of the nation were Christ rising from the grave and walking among us. Doctors of Democratic Death have been spreading delusions across the country over the past six decades as the patient withers and dies; among them Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump.
The United States was in good shape. Slaves and landowners in the original Thirteen Colonies had revolted, over an unjust tea tax imposed by Britain without the consent of the governed, and sought to establish a government that derived its powers “from the consent of the governed.” This audacious ideal was unrealistic, since women and blacks had originally had no voice in government. But as Martin Luther King, Jr. later declared, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Slavery ended, women gained the right to vote, education improved, and by the beginning of the twentieth century, democracy seemed to be in a strong state. Most people trusted the institutions of government, and while Jim Crow policies and economic inequality during the Gilded Age led many to question the country’s vitality, the vast majority of us ignored the warning signs.
World War I marked the rise of the United States on the world stage. Coming out of the Great Depression, a period unlike any the country had ever seen, Franklin D. Roosevelt rallied the nation and told us that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” The country rose to the challenge, and the greatest generation that survived the Depression and served in World War II built the atomic bomb and made us a superpower. The United States could not have known that its greatest success contained its greatest challenge and, ultimately, its undoing. Of course, it did not seem that way at the time—to those who were doing well.
But in the end, there was a generational accumulation of poverty, lack of education, and health care, along with racism and misogyny.
Meanwhile, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about greed and the military-industrial complex. But we didn’t listen. After 170 years of existence, the United States enjoyed its arrogance and dominance on the world stage. We fought for profit. We partied like drunken youths. We dictated to other nations as if we had the highest moral standards. We preached our purity, our morality, and our success. And when we deemed it necessary, we didn’t just preach; we forced others to bend to our will. Why not? The United States? To hell with the world. We ran it.
The bright side of all this optimism and hope for the future peaked with John F. Kennedy. At his inauguration, the youngest president ever elected said, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” In speaking of our ability to work together, Kennedy’s inaugural address led many to believe that the United States was in the healthiest nation in the world, past, present, and perhaps future. “The energy, faith and dedication we bring to this endeavor will light up our country and all who serve it — and the glow from that fire can truly light up the world,” he said with pride and without bias.
But the national disease, despite its symptoms few understood, spread and before the end of Kennedy’s first term, he was assassinated in Dallas – and to this day, not all the facts about that dark day have been revealed. This allowed calls for conspiracies and accusations of a deep state to take hold. Now the disease is in plain sight.
Soon after, the country turned on itself again, killing Martin Luther King, who had sworn to a moral arc to the universe. Six weeks later, Bobby Kennedy, who had mourned King, was shot dead in Los Angeles. In 1968, a chaotic Democratic convention in Chicago led to Mayor Richard Daley’s police beating and jailing protesters. The subsequent trial of the Chicago Seven showed how weak people’s faith in the political system was, how inconsistent and how authoritarian the system was.
In the past, most of us didn’t recognize the signs of a deadly disease. We celebrated our freedom in art and music, but the Hays Code still dominated movies, and Jim Morrison was banned from the Ed Sullivan Show after singing “Girl, We Ain’t Gonna Get It Higher.” The ability to accept two opposing strands of thought highlighted the country’s divided character.
Some of us have marched for peace while our government has been at war. Sirens at graveyards, Norman Solomon said in his book Making Love War, have become normal to those who have come to terms with the facts. “The planet is now at its worst regarding human survival,” he warned.
But the United States did not heed these pleas. When the World Trade Center fell to terrorists, we briefly united, but soon afterward we divided into our own frightened little corners. The terrorists had somehow won. Or, to put it more accurately, the national disease was so advanced that the United States could no longer think straight. We passed the Patriot Act. Elsewhere, we were so ignorant that we passed the No Child Left Behind Act — which left an entire generation of American children uneducated and unprepared for adulthood.
Our infrastructure is crumbling. We haven’t adopted universal health care. We have refused to pass responsible gun legislation. Our elected officials have become more callous and less intelligent. We have gone from a strong economy that built a prosperous middle class to a bloated economy that feeds the filthy rich and rips off everyone else. The age of robber barons is back. We have entered a technological dark age that has further fueled our national disease.
The disease had destroyed our cognitive functions. Our institutions could no longer sustain themselves because they could not connect with others or care for themselves. In the final stages of the disease, the country withered—electing older men to its highest offices, while Congress and the judiciary retreated from progressiveness to Christian nationalism. It was as if the country knew it was dying and was turning to a higher power to save it because it could no longer save itself. Women lost the right to health care. Lawmakers demanded that the Ten Commandments be taught in public schools—in a country that had prided itself on separating church and state to avoid centuries of conflict that had plagued Europe. The high tide of American ideals had long since disappeared. What remained was a walking corpse.
As the Supreme Court fired the fatal shot, President Joe Biden tried to offer hope, but he only reminded us of how far we have fallen.
“Today, the Supreme Court used a bulldozer to destroy the democratic creed that no one—including presidents and former presidents—is above the law.” But people weren’t listening. They were too busy being upset about their appearance at a recent debate. And the media, which had long since abandoned its mission to inform the public, instead tried to entertain people with wild accusations and shocking headlines—all for money.
Three years ago, after Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, Mitch McConnell explained, “We have a criminal justice system in this country… and former presidents are not immune from accountability.” No one should lose sight of the fact that the last cry in defense of the United States came from one of the chief architects of its demise. Today, with the blessing of a politicized Supreme Court, presidents are now immune from criminal prosecution for using their office to assassinate political opponents, orchestrate a military coup, or accept bribes.
The rest of us live on the whims of corpses. Many of us suffer from the fourth form of sadness: depression. Some would rather die than move on. “If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it and reduce the surplus population.”
For American voters to turn the corner and embrace hope and a better future from this political death.
