Happy July 4th
Hey, what can you say? We were overdue, but it’ll be over soon- Bo Burnham
This Independence Day feels especially awkward, doesn’t it? We’ve come to the 250th birthday of what many refer to as the greatest experiment in human liberty, and yet that experiment feels more and more like a failure every year. We’re spending obscene amounts of money on the military instead of on actually useful things like education, universal health care, affordable housing, and renewable energy. The rest of the world has been all but enslaved by our military-industrial complex and multinational corporations, with China seemingly the only thing stopping us from taking over the world entirely. The government has been taken over by originalist conservatives who think the Constitution is fine as it is and that we can solve 21st-century problems with 18th-century solutions. Everywhere we look, it seems as if the system we’ve come to rely on is collapsing in on itself.
This type of subject isn’t new for this blog. I made a post right after Trump was elected a second time that I entitled “I’m Ashamed to Be an American”, in which I vented my feelings of anger and sadness over America somehow choosing Barrabas a second time. Technically, that isn’t actually true; 90 million eligible voters didn’t vote at all, as opposed to 77 million for Trump and 75 million for Kamala Harris. There are probably several reasons for this, from swapping out Joe Biden for Harris halfway through the race and Harris being a woman of color in a country that systemically discriminates against both to Harris refusing to distance herself from Israel despite their continuing genocide against Palestinians (I did vote for her, albeit very reluctantly). Still, the whys and wherefores aren’t as important now as what is to be done now that the Christian nationalists are in charge.
I made a prediction in “Ashamed” that the administration would find itself repeating Isoroku Yamamoto’s (likely apocryphal) post-Pearl Harbor quote that “I fear all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” In some ways, that prediction is proving true. The No Kings protests have proven extremely popular, to the point that the March 2026 protest (carried out in the wake of several extrajudicial killings by ICE officers (Keith Porter, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti, to name but a few), the war with Iran, and Trump’s several domestic military deployments) has been named the largest single-day protest in American history, totaling eight million people. Granted, the real test of this prediction will probably be the 2026 midterm elections, and while Trump has been doing his damndest to rig those, I’m fairly certain they won’t turn out in his favor (and even if he does try to brute force the election into a shape he likes, I’m confident that will be a bridge too far for all but his most loyal supporters).
In all, I think my overall feelings toward America on its 250th birthday are best echoed by Rebecca Solnit’s recent article for The Guardian titled “What is the United States of America now?” She highlights that the United States is far too expansive to be entirely good or entirely bad. It is represented by the ICE agents who killed Renee Good and the ordinary people who protested her murder. It is represented by petrochemical billionaires and the environmental groups that oppose them. It is represented by the Ku Klux Klan and Martin Luther King Jr. It is represented by the settlers who rent Indigenous communities asunder and the Native Americans still alive today and still carrying their traditions in defiance of white supremacy. She highlights several acts of defiance against the MAGA movement, like Zohran Mamdani’s election as the mayor of New York City and Bad Bunny’s beautifully multicultural Super Bowl halftime show, where he reminded us that the Americas are not confined to the United States and that they stretch all the way from Ellesmere Island (Canada’s northernmost point) to Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost tip of South America.
Solnit ends her article by stating:
In the end, I come back to Abraham Lincoln at the battlefield and burial grounds of Gettysburg: “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work … that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
That is in one sense an ideal never yet realized, in the other a moral north toward which this country at its best has been pointing for those 250 years.
The moral arc of the universe may bend towards justice, as Dr. King once said, but only if we the people put our collective thumbs on the scale.
Before I go, though, I want to give you some updates, both for the blog and for real life.
You may remember that I mentioned in my previous update post that my online therapist had applied to enroll me in a care management program that could help me do things that I probably can’t do on my own due to my autism (find friends, get a driver’s license, find my own place to live, etc.). Well, I have good news on that front: I’m in! I’ve already had several email exchanges with my new care manager, who pointed me to several resources to help me get started (ACCESS-VR, the New York State Office for People With Developmental Disabilities, and the Healthy Alliance). I’ve also been assigned what they call a peer specialist, who is a person similar to me in age who’s dealt with similar mental issues to the ones I’ve been dealing with for a more personal therapeutic touch than what my therapist (a middle-aged woman) can offer.
I haven’t made calls to any of the above services as of this writing, as I’m waiting until after my annual family Fourth of July party to really get into the thick of it. I have connected with a driving school in a city about 1 ½ hours away from where I live that is willing to come to me for in-person lessons at a higher-than-normal rate, which my parents think is worth it. They even offered to enroll me in their 5-hour course via Zoom later this month, which is certainly another thing to take off the checklist.
I’m not yet sure how this will affect my upload schedule, but rest assured I’m still dedicated to continuing my work on this blog. I’m currently hard at work on my best animated movies and TV shows list for 2025. I’ve also decided how I’m going to finish the Jurassic Park retrospective. I’ve decided that I don’t have it in me to do articles on the two animated series (Camp Cretaceous and Chaos Theory) as lengthy and detailed as the ones I did for the movies (nor will I likely have the time, given the real-life developments I just laid out above), and that I will give both of them a short review with a single article and call the retropective finished then and there. After two years of fits and starts, I think it’s finally time for me to stop dragging this project out and cut it off before it gets even more out of control. Besides, I have other ongoing projects like “Cryptids of North America” and “1001 Animations” to worry about, and I generally have much more fun writing those (speaking of which, “Cryptids of North Carolina” will most definitely be the next article after Jurassic Park). I might have more updates about the post-JP future of this blog after that article comes out, but for now, those are my only concrete plans for Preston Posits in the immediate future.
For now, though, I hope you all stay safe, have a fun weekend, and remember to wish America the 250th birthday it deserves. Take care, beautiful watchers!
