A man that I was fortunate enough to work with...a brilliant educator, designer, art director, and set designer for national television, film and stage has some pertinent words to share (along with historian Hearther Cox Richardson) :
As a designer, I understand how visual messages and design choices matter, and what they communicate. This is an image that pays homage to, and incorporates the messaging of fascism. In fact, it looks eerily way too much like the Nazi rally at Madison Square Gardens in 1939.
When I read that he used a Fourth of July appearance not to celebrate what is good about our country and to make a call to come together as a nation to overcome a crisis that we are facing (as virtually every president before him has done) but to deliver one of his most divisive and inflammatory speeches ever, calling out the efforts of young people today as "fascism" (heaped in irony, as he uses fascist tactics every day of his failed presidency)...I thought about writing some words about what is *actually happening* in our country right now.
However, Heather Cox Richardson has, of course, done a better job than I ever could.
July 3, 2020
Heather Cox Richardson
And on July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, declaring: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."
For all the fact that the congressmen got around the sticky little problem of black and Indian slavery by defining "men" as "white men," and for all that it never crossed their mind that women might also have rights, the Declaration of Independence was an astonishingly radical document. In a world that had been dominated by a small class of rich men for so long that most people simply accepted that they should be forever tied to their status at birth, a group of upstart legislators on the edge of a wilderness continent declared that no man was born better than any other.
America was founded on the radical idea that all men are created equal.
What the founders declared self-evident was not so clear eighty-seven years later, when southern white men went to war to reshape America into a nation in which African Americans, Indians, Chinese, and Irish were locked into a lower status than whites. In that era, equality had become a "proposition," rather than "self-evident." "Four score and seven years ago," Abraham Lincoln reminded Americans, "our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." In 1863, Lincoln explained, the Civil War was "testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."
It did, of course. The Confederate rebellion failed. The United States endured, and Americans began to expand the idea that all men are created equal to include men of color, and eventually to include women.
But just as in the 1850s, we are now, once again, facing a rebellion against our founding principle, as a few wealthy men seek to reshape America into a nation in which certain people are better than others.
The men who signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 pledged their "Lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor" to defend the idea of human equality. Ever since then, Americans have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives, for that principle. Lincoln reminded Civil War Americans of those sacrifices when he urged the people of his era to "take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—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."
Words to live by in 2020.
Happy Independence Day, everyone.
