"The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common."

Last year on the 4th of July, Democracy Now broadcast a speech by Frederick Douglass which he delivered on this day in 1852. I don't know whose voice read the words, but it was genuinely thrilling to listen to it.

This year, rereading it was my only observance of this holiday (other than telling my dog to shut up and quit barking at the damn fireworks).

You can read the full text here and some good excerpts here.

Douglass's prose style is in itself a delight, even more sublime when combined with the content. He basically came right out & told the people who'd invited him to speak that they were "requiring a song of the captive," that they were asking him to speak in celebration when he saw little reason to celebrate liberty in a nation that still held so many in bondage.

His words seem particularly appropriate at a time when the bigwigs in this country—who undoubtedly marked the day with much pomp and ceremony and pontification on themes of "freedom" and "democracy"—are preparing for the G8 meeting in Scotland, where they will determine the fate of millions who have neither voice nor vote in the proceedings.

O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation's ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

Isn't he fantastic? Can't you just hear him when he's really on a roll?

May we live to see a 4th of July when everyone in the world is genuinely independent of the imperial caprice of this land of "revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy."

What, to the slave, is your 4th of July?