WPCNR NEWS & COMMENT By John F. Bailey. July 4, 2025:
I DID NOT GO to the fireworks in White Plains New York USA.
There should be no fireworks anywhere in America today.
Because there is little to celebrate about America anymore.
What Americans used to celebrate on July 4 in the past no longer exists.
It is a memory, a once shining hope the world always looked to for inspiration.
That America is forever gone.
I miss it so.
We may never see that respect and admiration from the world again.
Our reputation for standing up for the good, the decent, and the just has been smeared and shattered by persons who should have known better.
America to the rescue no more. I was always proud of that.
Unselfish acceptance of persons in trouble coming to our shores to start a new life: the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, Latinos, Africans, Asians, Muslims– has been callously, proudly, viciously attacked by our “leaders” in congress.
Both houses of congress and a mean-spirited selfish man have aroused hatred of the different, the oppressed, the persecuted, and the poor, in citizens who should know better.
There but for the grace of God go you and I, Mr. and Mrs. And Ms. America.
We collectively bear full responsibility for the death of the America Dream, by not paying attention, by buying into a line and a hate.
How quickly America’s heart hardened to stone.
Cruelty rationalized. Hate defended. Discrimination championed. Truth attacked.
That was never the American Way.
6 months is all it has taken.
A year of a media circus campaign followed by the nomination of “An American Strongman,” a man of the people champion who spoke of “Making America Great Again.”
The media carried and publicized dutifully the ranting of this man. Because he was good copy. “Everything is copy,” it has once been said. But no judgment was used. Nothing was censored. The media were putty in this man’s hands. Criticism was labled as fake news.
The man who condoned and popularized hatred of his opponents, who courted the cooperation of an enemy of America to influence his election, and who reveled in his denigration of women and the weak was elevated to an exulted level. Too many of us bought the easy answers.
His opponent in the election underestimated him. She failed to grasp the visceral violence he aroused in voters—voters who only saw the promise of their personal getting even with their perceived tormentors and disregarding the premise of this very mastermind.
Half of the voters in the country ate his message up.
That horrendous campaign has been followed up with a march on American values that, like those before him and his henchmen: Mongols, Huns, Cossacks, Barbarians and Nazis rampaged across Europe with sword and violence.
The weapons today are microphones, videos, propaganda, slogans and big lies that play as convenient truths, executive orders laying waste to reason and morality in this nation, forsaking our friends of the past and uplifting the evil leaders of the world. And initiatives ineptly executed, inappropriate, and bungled because of the inability to manage and think.
I and you have seen 180 days of dismantling rights taken for granted by Americans. Courts ruled by idealogues full of their bluster. Justices making rights-robbing decisions virtually one jaw dropper a week.
Ludircrous Leaders in cabinet positions opposed to the missions of their agencies.
How great are we now?
The promise of America has been forever broken.
How great are we now?
It is embarrassing to be an American for what this neo-Nazi government has done in just 6 months.
As fireworks explosions are prepared to celebrate a government that now rips children away from families at the border . Adequate records not even being kept. Are photographs being taken of the children already in custody with their parents? Who knows? Reporters have not even documented the process of what happens in the separations.
We now have masked police.
Now America, look at you: America has “Children Concentration Camps.”
Look at you America, you now are going to test children’s DNA with the parents who brought them to make sure they are not “Fake children.” The birthright guarantee is going to be revoked. But will it be retroactive?
America did not used to be afraid of children.
But hate was always under the surface that the premise of America had to always fight.
Hate is always poised to raise its horror, its ugliness, its indifference to the suffering of others. But it is not indifference. The haters love hurting people they consider inferior. It makes them feel good.
Slavery, the segregation of the South and the North (remember redlining?). Other than the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, and the Cavalry revenge massacres at Wounded Knee and the Washita River, and Andrew Jackson’s Trail of Tears (the Cherokee Indian death march), and the burning of Atlanta, and Bloody Kansas, we have forgotten our humanity conveniently in favor of the easy emotion: hate and destruction of lives because it makes us feel so good.
Look at you, America: Religious freedom for all. No more. Muslims are being ostracized by travel bans.
In fact the clergy, the Christians in America, I call you out: What would Jesus say about your failure to take in strangers or your condoning (as a matter of faith for crying out loud!) administration policies that hurt, displace, deny aid, and safety. There is nothing Christian about that.
Look at you, America, how what you have built in 248 years has been ripped away in 4 feckless days by both houses of congress resulting in a vote that what featured only one Democrat in the House speaking for 8 hours. Where was every Democrat poised to vote against the bill not follow up and delay for days the vote. I guess they all wanted to head off on vacation.
Look at those fireworks, and this year they will represent an America flaming apart in the night falling.
Look at what it takes to be an American of the past now.
You are a drifter still believing in freedom and truth, justice and the American Way in your heart, mourning what America once was and is no more.
I remember not the country whose leadership has betrayed its country’s promise this week with little effort to stop it. This was America’s Last Stand, and no congressman or senator fought to the last man or woman. Seven New York Republicans voted against their own state. Gutless.
Remember their names: Rep. LaLota, the 48,000 in Rep. Garbarino’s, the 52,000 in Rep. Malliotakis’, the 31,000 in Rep. Lawler’s, the 44,000 in Rep. Stefanik’s, the 35,000 in Rep. Langworthy’s, and the 31,000 in Rep. Tenney’s. They could have saved us but did not.
America has died in one week.
Its leadership has betrayed its war dead and veterans who fought for truth, justice and the American Way and the Pursuit of Happiness.
America, Look at you and remember what you once meant to millions.
The Stars and Stripes are no longer forever.
Old Glory is tattered, the white and red stripes wrinkled, ripped, furling asunder in the cruel winds of hate, in total disunity, no longer a whole flag. A hydra of hate, no longer proud.
The white stars falling out of the blue background lose their unity. Scatter to the four winds.
Lay a wreath on the flag.
Cancel the fireworks celebrations everywhere.
There is nothing to celebrate this July 4.
But for those of us old Americans, who remember what America used to stand for, our work is just beginning.
We are the last Americans at the barricades like the first Americans at Bunker Hill in Boston.
Even those of us who may just now are beginning to realize how they have been taken in by slogan, lies and hate and are beginning to feel uneasy.
I want you with us.
We the Americans left have a lot of work to do to make America the Greatest again, all over again.
Give us time, old friends.
You and I have to knit that Grand Old Flag back together again.
Stitch by stitch.
Vote by Vote.
Heart by Heart.
Lincoln by Lincoln.
Every member of congress knows what they did last week.
We all know what happened this week, the U.S. Congress of 2025 has transformed into the American Reichstag emulating the German Reichstag of 1933 and turned over absolute power to Adolf Hitler in a bill that none have a clue of how its policies will be carried out, when they will be inacted, ignoring warnings of impact on citizens.
We know too what our job is.
Work will be hard.
We are on the barricades now
We have to work and take care of our little space and if all the citizens in every little town, big town, city, rich state, poor state, agriculture state turn their eyes inward to work for the good in our towns and thwart the the strategies that wreak our communities and restore the takeaways just approved with blessings by the representatives who have betrayed their oaths that’s our mission now.
Are you with me?
Lafayette, we are here.
