I’m taking a rest. No newsletter today, no live tomorrow, and honestly, you should rest too.
But before I go, can we sit for a minute with where America is on her two hundred and fiftieth birthday. Because there are people in this country who will never see her as a fully realized grown woman. They want her young forever; they want to pull her back to 17, back to 1776, and there is something Epstein-level perverse in that, wanting the country the way some men want a girl, beautiful only as she was, never as she is, never with all the complexity that two hundred and fifty years bring.
A lot of people feel a lot of ways about the Fourth of July, and they’re entitled to every one of them. Frederick Douglass stood up in Rochester in 1852 and asked what the Fourth of July meant to the slave, and he answered that this holiday was never ours. And yet my grandparents, my great-grandparents, my great-great-grandparents, and my great-great-great-grandparents lived and died on this soil. I won’t cede my right to be here, and you cannot tell me what it means to love this place. I won’t cede that to anyone.
So I’m going to rest because I’m tired. Normally I’m gallivanting this time of year, but this is the first Fourth in years that I’ll be home, and I’ve got other work that needs to get done. Gone fishing.
