Fireworks, hot dogs, music, and inequality on the Fourth of July

Why you ain’t march on Selma?
Why you ain’t tell the refugees “please stay with me”?
Why when you take communion, it don’t remind you of your union that you too were once undocumented too?
Why do you love your guns more than our sons?
Why you patriots first? Why you worshipping the flag? — Propaganda

Today, we celebrate the Fourth of July, America’s independence. We eat hot dogs; we watch baseball; we go on a picnic; we enjoy fireworks; we sing patriotic songs. In essence, we throw a party to commemorate our birth as a country. However, there are issues that should cause us to think about what, in fact, we extol on this summer day. I am not saying we should not celebrate the great things we have achieved as a nation; I am only saying that for all of those great things there are unsavory things that we need to rectify if we ever hope to live up to those ideals laid out in the Declaration of Independence “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.”

The ideals presented in one of our founding documents still have not been realized. Inequality still exists. The “unalienable Rights” that…