Jul 8, 2020

July 4, 2020

An Account of the Protests in Washington, D.C. on July 4th, 2020
By Matthew R. Bishop / filmsforaction.org
July 4, 2020
A photo of a statue at Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., guarded by both a fence and a chain-link barricade, in June 2020, from Matthew R. Bishop.

July 4th, 2020

Chapters:

I-II: A Recap of June 2020

III-VIII: A First-Person Account of the Events of July 4th, 2020, in Washington, D.C.

Matthew R. Bishop — July 4th, 2020 — Washington, D.C.

Matthew R. Bishop is an author, journalist, and political science consultant from Columbus, Ohio. The below is a first-person record of his lived experiences in June and July of 2020, narrated through his own point of view.

This is primarily intended to serve as an autobiographical record of the events which transpired on the afternoon of July 4th, 2020, in Washington, D.C.

For those unfamiliar with the events of June 2020, Chapters I and II provide a brief recap of only a few key events selected out of many. Further extensive reading is recommended. The account of July 4th itself begins on Chapter III.


I: What Happened in June 2020?

I made up my mind to come to Washington, D.C., shortly after the protest movement began.

The first straw for all of us was when we saw police units around the country brutally and violently suppressing a protest which was literally a protest against police brutality and excess violence in the first place.

The final straw was when the Trump administration called up the active-duty military, and then repeatedly referred to nonviolent civilian demonstrators as “terrorists”, purposefully laying out the legal groundwork for these soldiers to use lethal force against American civilian populations on a massive scale. This was the Rubicon of full-on fascism. It was clear then that if the people of this country fail to rise up and prevent this from happening, the American Republic will die and the Union of the States will dissolve.

I spent the weeks before D.C. working on writing and circulating petitions, consolidating lists of grievances and demands, and writing op-eds for the newspapers to explain the events which were rapidly unfolding — and they were rapid, so rapid that I think most people stopped following the news, and those who kept on following it just could not believe what they were reading.

An unmarked mercenary army occupied Washington, D.C. The mercenaries answered to the Department of Justice and Attorney-General William Barr, and were exempt from the normal rules and ordinances of any American soldier. Barr had previously broken up a peaceful daytime assembly at a church and public park with the use of tear gas. Residents of D.C. were afraid that these unmarked, unaccountable troops might start “disappearing” citizen-activists, or else that they would continue to escalate violence, as Trump’s administration had already been doing on a daily basis.

I was on edge before these events — we had already lost one young girl in Columbus, a 22-year-old recent graduate of OSU, when a crowd of our people were attacked by a police gang. She died, and it seemed like barely anyone cared, because so many people were getting shot and killed all around the country, Americans literally could not keep up with the news.

Journalists like myself were terrified, and it was overwhelming to keep a tally of the casualties. 18 journalists shot. 36 journalists shot. 86 journalists shot in one week. Three blinded. Twelve blinded. Ten arrested. Three hundred arrested. The numbers skyrocketed just like COVID-19 when no one wears a damn mask. We felt so helpless collecting these numbers while around the country our fellow citizens were being targeted and shot.

It was not just journalists and dissident protest organizers — it was medical responders, it was legal observers, it was all the kinds of people who you just do not shoot. If you respect democracy, you just don’t shoot these people. They are the staples of a free, accountable civilization. Without them, freedom, government accountability, and ultimately democracy will die.

All people have a right to be here. All people have a right to speak. All people have a right to demand justice, to petition their government, and to overthrow that government when it becomes clear that there has been an intentional, irrevocable breach of the social contract.

So you can imagine, by the time Trump called in the active military and started publicly calling us terrorists, of course we believed that he intended to use lethal force against us. That’s why a politician labels someone as a terrorist in the first place. The whole point is to lay down the moral and legal framework wherein it becomes acceptable to employ lethal military force against the designated target. He had already shown a perverse eagerness to incite violence and disunion between the people of America in a moment of crisis, time and time again. We did not just fear that he would use widespread lethal force against American civilian groups — we expected it.

In early June, I joined an anti-fascist civilian dissident group, and we planned a series of marches and protests in the nation’s capital. I arrived in D.C. mid-June, when things had calmed down. Now, I should explain why things were calmer by the time I arrived — this is a real plot twist. It has nothing to do with us.


II: The Military Schism of June 2020

After all of the traumatic events described above, I was not the only one speaking out. Well, first of all, the entire mass media was speaking out, with shocking headlines from major American newspapers like Our Journalists Are Being Shot! and Stop Killing Us! And perhaps that helped a great deal, but it was the schism inside of the United States Armed Forces itself which ultimately forced President Trump to back down.

I think the Pentagon saw what was happening in this country at least as clearly as we did, and they reacted in real-time. The Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a declassified memo and released it to the public. In this memo, they reminded soldiers to obey their oaths to the United States Constitution (not the President), and that in the event a soldier receives orders contrary to the Constitution, it should be clear those orders must be disobeyed. Separately, they reminded National Guardsmen that they are to obey the orders of their respective State Governors, and they do not answer to the President of the United States.

Former U.S. Secretaries of Defense and chief intelligence officers, in the days surrounding this, issued their own statements, condemning the President of the United States as a threat to American national security and, in some cases, alluding to treason.

This was a unanimous statement of public dissent from the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States Armed Forces, and it was intended to protect the protest movement. The Constitution upholds the rights of the citizen to speak, to assemble, and to petition his or her government for reform. By alluding to the American soldier’s supreme loyalty to this code of values, America’s top brass was giving a direct order for their troops to defend these rights, even if it meant defending them against the Commander-in-Chief himself.

Separately, huge numbers of individual soldiers were expressing their dissent, and publicly stating that they would never follow such orders from the Commander-in-Chief. A grassroots dissident movement grew within the ranks of America’s Armed Forces.

This has never happened since the American Civil War.

The reason this never happens is because it edges America closer to the conditions which allow for a military coup. This is why the Armed Forces are meant to remain as an apolitical force. They never intervene in politics, and that remains their position. For them to make a unanimous public statement of this kind signifies that the country is in grave and immediate danger from a very real threat which requires the military to abandon its own rules and norms — and that our military leadership unanimously agrees on the scale of that threat.

The fallout of this schism was enormous. President Trump felt surrounded. He had been publicly shunned by the nation’s highest generals. Faced with widespread dissent within the ranks of his own military, he now was unsure if he even had the physical power to break up these protests at all. He might give the orders, but no one would listen.

This was a reassuring gesture of solidarity from the U.S. Armed Forces to American civilian activists, and we appreciated the gesture. In the days and weeks following, protests began to grow more civil. Police and federal forces were less violent. Fewer journalists, medics, and legal responders were getting shot. The burning and the looting died down considerably. Civilian deaths and casualties both declined. All in all, such a high-level statement of solidarity from our military and intelligence leaders ultimately reassured the American people that they are on our side. It had a calming effect on the whole movement almost at once.

So there was not the same level of urgency when I finally did arrive in D.C. on June 17th, 2020.

I went up to U St. the weekend I got in, and there was a huge street festival going on one night, with thousands of people out occupying closed-down streets, setting off fireworks on the side of the road, and in general the mood was one of protest and celebration mixed together. There were hundreds of police in the area — that was just D.C. in all of June — but there was no sense of conflict between the hundreds of officers and the thousands of civilians.

In fact, there was one man in a car who looked to be thinking of attacking the protest (counter-protestors frequently run into crowds of protestors with their cars, killing civilians on a few occasions), and I witnessed a police officer place himself in front of the man’s car right as he was speeding up, and the officer banged on the windows and shouted at the man until the driver stopped. So here was an incident where an officer actually prevented a real act of terrorism against a civilian crowd. There was no further conflict or event that night which I’m aware of.

The two weeks following were weeks of civil protest, but not unrest. Extrajudicial (or outright illegal) attacks on civilians declined. Certain U.S. cities saw a spike in protests where single incidents did occur, but across the country, the protest movement began to stabilize as it transitioned into a long-term, non-violent dissent movement. For a while, it was easy to imagine these troubles had never happened at all, but the truth is that this nation very narrowly avoided a crisis which would have torn it apart.


 


III: BLACK LIVES MATTER

There was already a confrontation when I arrived at the protest on July 4th, 2020, outside of the barricaded Lafayette Park.

Speaking to a small crowd at the north end of the road, about twenty anti-fascists had gathered to spread their arguments and petitions calling for the abdication of President Trump and Vice President Pence. But a group of loud, militant Black men were fighting with them, and it wasn’t about regime change at all — it was about gay rights, of all things.

For a long time, I just stood there listening. I did not know what the altercation was about at first, because none of what they said made any sense — until I finally realized, wait, they actually don’t make any sense. These people are fucking crazy.

The group of Black men were all dressed in similar fashion, and some of them carried books and staves, and it became apparent that they belonged to some kind of religious extremist cult. Many of them had menorahs sewn onto their vests like some kind of cult insignia, so I assumed they were Zionists. Violently, as if they were trying to start a fight, they screamed at the anti-fascists about how homosexuality would destroy democracy, and how a true Black separatist (as they named themselves) cannot tolerate gay people among their ranks. I also overheard some ethnic cleansing rhetoric, and at least one of their members saying we need to “purge” some group of people from both America and the Middle East — purge all Muslims, I thought at first, because I could not hear any better.

A handful of enraged anti-fascists shouted back at them and responded to their challenge to a fight, but behind these individuals were a group of lesbian anti-fascists openly kissing each other and fondling each other, daring the far-right cult members to stop them. I laughed. That was much more effective than fighting, and what kind of man will attack two unarmed women? Good for them, I thought.

So it was not any genuine political platform which disrupted the anti-fascist speeches. It was just this small group of extremely loud, violent, and hateful people whose beliefs, of course, have no place in a pro-democracy protest. Once I understood that these cult members have no credible views, I moved on.

There were other speakers assembled outside of the barricaded Lafayette Park, and long walls of memorials hung up on chain links, just pieces of scrap cardboard with pictures glued on and names written in black sharpie. Remember my son. A picture, and dates of birth and death. Remember my brother. Another picture, more dates. My life matters. No signature. Just another anonymous sign. Ten more faces, one hundred faces, quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr., popular protest slogans — a handful of political satire jokes caused me to laugh inappropriately on two occasions. But comedy has its place in a revolution, too.

I spent a while just walking in silence, reading the names, the faces, the dates, the quotes, the statements, the memorials. I saw two people hanging a new face up on the chain-link barricade. Another person I would never know.

Shortly after the confrontation at the north end of the road, another assembly grew at the south end, by the barricade itself. There, in full view of at least twenty police officers, a crowd of anti-fascists gathered together, took up a bull horn, and announced that they would be ceremoniously burning the flag of the United States. They called everyone to gather together for the burning.


IV: My Dad Matters!

The protest leader here — a young, charismatic Black man — reminded the citizens and police officers present that to burn the flag is an act of free speech as interpreted by the United States Supreme Court. Having established their legal right, the protest leader then went over a brief list of grievances, which explained the morality of their movement’s decision to burn this flag. He recited these grievances while lighting the flag, and continued as the smoke started to rise, drawing an ever-larger crowd.

There was a lot of noise, but I was trying to focus on this list of grievances through all the shouting. It was not an easy thing to do. I picked up only a handful of things, which I’ve paraphrased, because it was impossible to hear every word verbatim: In a nation of extraordinary wealth, extreme poverty should not be the norm. In a nation of medical innovation, we cannot have a population locked out of accessing healthcare. In a nation with six homes for each homeless human, why are we putting dogs and cats in shelters, while our people sleep in the cold? We believe every human is born with dignity. We will fight for every human. Join us!

Eventually, having recited an abbreviated list of grievances, the leader began shouting while the American flag burned: America is unbreakable! America is unbreakable! Say it with me! The flag will burn, but this nation will never break! We are the nation, we are the people, and we demand a new government! We will form a new government! America will never break! America will never break!

The crowd took up the chant as the fire spread: America will never break! America will never break!

They repeated it over and over, until it became the prevailing chant of the entire protest here.

It was a fascinating thing to witness — the protestors casted the flag as the symbol of a fascist, illegitimate, unelected government, which it is the patriotic duty of true Americans to overthrow and rise against. Burning the flag, in this narrative, was an assertion of the rights and values of American political identity.

When the burning was completed, the leader shouted into the crowd: “Take a piece, everyone! This will be history one day. The flag we burned at the White House on the Fourth of July. Everyone take a piece, come on!”

A very small number of individuals eagerly walked up to take a piece. The rest of us, including myself, stood back. I was working out how I felt about the situation. I imagine most of these other folks were, as well.

I was not initially happy with the burning. I understand it’s a publicity stunt, and it draws attention, but beyond that, it also divides the movement. It ostracizes, for example, American soldiers and veterans, who have a profound emotional attachment to this flag. And it makes moderate Americans feel like they cannot relate to the movement, whereas in reality, many of the concerns the average American has are quite relevant to our movement.

Ultimately, when our infighting is resolved, we are going to need to reach out to the moderate center and invite them to participate in a wider national dialogue. Publicity stunts like this may be beneficial in the short term, but they jeopardize the long-term success of the whole revolution.

I considered voicing these concerns, but that role was taken from me by a much more public and passionate confrontation, which became the central focus of the events unfolding today: The crying girl.

It was a solid twenty minutes before this next confrontation occurred. It started very small, when a single young woman walked up to the ashes of the American flag lying on the ground, and she began to cry.

Immediately a swarm of angry protestors descended upon her, insulting her and shaming her for crying over the burning flag.

They mocked her and shouted at her while she stood there sobbing.

She tried to talk back to them, to explain and defend herself — as if a woman should have to make excuses for crying, for feeling pain, for feeling sorrow? — but the protestors just shouted over her, and it appeared they were trying to pick a fight with her. And these were not the violent far-right religious protestors, to be clear. These were the anti-fascists, the left-wing protestors, who were shaming and insulting her.

The situation became so awful that the protest leader of the anti-fascist group himself — the same man who lit the flag — came over to separate the crying girl from some of the antagonists in his own crowd, and then the two of them spoke in front of a much larger crowd, and he explained to her all of the reasons why the flag was offensive to them.

Here was the clearest articulation of his grievances against the flag, and he shouted this without any horns or microphones to a crowd of one hundred-plus: The U.S. flag represents slavery, and a Union which failed to care about that issue for almost a full century. It represents the brutal post-Confederate revivalist south, and the institutions of Jim Crow after the war. It represents a country where Black men had to fight, but they couldn’t vote — and then when they could vote, the government decided it would be better to put them all in jail and make them work for free, and now they still can’t vote. Today, slavery continues as a government-sanctioned program sold to private, for-profit prison companies that depend on the use of unpaid prison labor. Fuck that flag. The system cannot be reformed. It must be overthrown. There must be revolution!

And she just kept crying and crying, and repeating: That’s not what that means! And she never explained herself until finally she burst out into this emotional explosion of sobbing and screaming, wherein she narrated to the growing audience how her father had been killed in Iraq, while he was defending that flag and wearing it over his chest.

The key difference was this: For her, the flag didn’t mean any of those terrible things. It just meant her dad. She was just crying because she missed her dad.

The audience did not care. They kept on badgering her, trying to provoke her into a fight. The protest leader struck a more reconciliatory note when she told the crowd about her dad, and now he tried to have a conversation with her regarding the ideals which American soldiers fight and die for, but of course the enraged mob was not interested, and they started to shout over their own leader.

The anti-fascists yelled at her while pretending to fake-cry: White tears! Awww so saaad! and Fuck your feelings, bitch!

The crying girl yelled back at them: My dad matters! Why doesn’t my dad matter?

I wanted desperately to intervene, just to tell her that her dad matters. That’s all she wanted to hear. She just needed to know that her dad’s life mattered.

The protestors kept shouting, but now their leader shouted back at them: “This is a teachable moment! When this happens, guys, we explain why we are doing what we’re doing, and we explain what the flag means to us.” He repeated that phrase — this is a teachable moment — as he implored the anti-fascist crowd to calm down.

The young man again recited his list of grievances, shouting them with commanding authority, so that the crowd was silenced and he regained control of the narrative. But this young man missed the point of it entirely. She was not disagreeing with their movement. She was not making a political statement at all. She just wanted someone to listen, and to care about her pain. She stood on the ashes of the American flag shouting over and over again into the mob: Why doesn’t my dad matter?


V: This Moment is For All of Us

I am not sure if we were making any progress in this conversation — it seemed there were too many spoilers for a constructive dialogue to exist here. And that was only among the anti-fascists and the communists, who were the most rational groups there, being the only groups whose leaders you can pull aside privately and have a constructive political discussion with. Whatever hope we had of finding some common ground with the crying girl was soon ruined by the deliberate spoiler actions of one particular extremist group — the same crowd from the first confrontation.

Attracted by the drama of this debate, a group of these hateful militant Zionists again pushed their way into the anti-fascist crowd. I was so curious about this very strange ideology, so I actually left the scene to spend some time observing them, and the best summary I can think of is to say that they are a cult of Black separatist Zionist warrior-monks. I wish I could say that was a joke.

These people all looked like professional warrior-athletes, and they dressed in these skin-tight shirts, and they literally carried fighting staves, and they split their time evenly in between preaching Black supremacy and Jewish supremacy, arguing that all true Black Americans need to launch a new crusade to reconquer the lost Holy Lands of Israel from the evil grasp of the evil Muslim, but they also need to declare independence from the evil White Man in America. In their spare time, they enjoyed assaulting gay protestors and lamenting how Black homosexuality is Black Man’s ultimate Sin.

So when I describe this group as “far-right Black supremacist-Zionist warrior monks”, keep in mind this is the most honest and accurate description possible for this surreal group of humans.

Five of their strongest-looking warriors came barreling into the anti-fascist crowd, armed with their fighting staves, trying to provoke some kind of conflict. In doing so, they seized the crowd’s attention away from the issues raised by the crying girl, and hijacked the narrative of the protest to suit their own agenda.

“A real Black man is a warrior! He is a warrior of God!” And other crazy Zionist shit, I kind of tuned it out, it was all such nonsense — although I was shocked to hear him at one point referencing the need for a new counter-Crusade to reclaim Israel for the oppressed American Black man. Why in the world does everyone always feel the need to conquer Israel, of all places, just because someone wrote about this place in a book thousands of years ago? When is that going to end?

I had spent this entire time thinking they were Zionists — some of them even had the menorah displayed on their uniforms as some sort of insignia — but then one observation caused me to question this, and I realized they’re not Zionists. I didn’t realize this until I saw their women huddled together quietly in a corner outside of the main protest area, about 40 of them altogether.

Their women were completely silent and obedient. They never spoke one word to anyone in the hours I was there. They always kept their eyes lowered. They were removed from the crowd and were not participating in any activity the entire time. They wore colorful and beautiful traditional Muslim dresses, complete with their hijabs, and were a stark contrast to their extremist, hyper-aggressive male partners. And they followed their men everywhere. In other words, they were the perfect ideal of a conservative, submissive Muslim wife.

So after almost two full hours of mistaking them for a Zionist group, I realized they were actually a Jihadist anti-Semitic group. To me, as a secular man, it’s all the same hateful nonsense, and it makes very little difference which particular group you want to eradicate just because their brand of religion is not the same as your brand of religion. I honestly struggle to tell the difference.

When I overhear talk of ethnic cleansing, reclaiming some holy land, and all of that other shit, I generally assume that it’s one religious group or another, and it really doesn’t matter which. They all believe in the same thing, which is that their group is Chosen, but the Other group is unholy, and the Chosen must cleanse the world of the Other. The thesis is the same. The only variable is how you choose to spell the name of God.

All the while as I made these observations to correct my initial error, the all-Black Jihadists picked up an argument with the anti-fascist socialist leader, himself a young Black male. The anti-fascist leader accused the Jihadists of hijacking Black American identity and warping it into the identity of a religious hate group — which seemed a perfectly sensible accusation for him to make — but of course, the hate group responded only with more hate (that is what hate groups do), doubling down on their accusations and urging the protestors to submit themselves to Allah and join their cause to expel the evil White Jew from the Land of Israel and reclaim it for the Black American Muslim.

The socialist leader turned his back to the Jihadists, and he spoke to his own crowd: “People come in here, they will always come here and try to play identity politics, and they want you to join their Crusade just because you’re a Black man. They want to tell you who to hate just ’cause you’re Black, and they think they can come up in here and use your identity and tell you who to hate! That’s not why we’re here, is it?”

No, some of the crowd shouted.

“No, it’s not!” Their speaker urged them on. “This movement doesn’t belong to Black men, and it doesn’t belong to White men, and it doesn’t belong to Muslims, and it doesn’t belong to Jews. Who does this movement belong to? Who does this moment belong to?

“It belongs to all of us!” A female voice shouted from a few lines back.

The speaker turned to the girl, and he shouted back into the crowd, with so much force that we couldn’t even hear the Jihadists anymore: “This movement belongs to nobody! This movement is for everybody! This movement is for all of us! No one owns this movement. No group owns this movement. This movement belongs to the people!”

Some protestors started chanting, and he encouraged them: “Say it with me! Say it with me! This movement is for all of us! This movement is for all of us!

The crowd grew more forceful, and the five Jihadists sensed that things were turning against them. They withdrew into their corner of the protest area, where no one came up to challenge them, and there was no further conflict.

This was a huge success for the socialist anti-fascist camp. They had not only regained control of the dominant narrative at both of the two main physical intersections of the protest area, but they made a loud and humiliating example out of the Jihadists, and shamed anyone who was willing to believe their hateful nonsense. They affirmed, furthermore, that this movement is a public asset, shared and co-cultivated by all the people of America. In doing so, they expelled this hate group and also broadened the scope of their own movement all in the same one-hour confrontation. It was the definitive victory of the day.


VI: We Have to Keep Fighting!

I went back to the crying girl after all of this, to hear more of her story, and maybe to reassure her. She was still sobbing. Three elderly Black sympathizers had come up to reassure her, but she was inconsolable. She was talking about how so many veterans come back with severe trauma, and it’s all they can do just to barely function like a normal human in civilian society at all in the first place, and can’t we understand what they’re going through? Why won’t we understand? And the three elders did not interrupt her or speak over her. They just let her cry, and they let her speak, and they listened.

But she was with four other friends now, and her friends were preaching their own views to a new crowd of people — taxation is theft, we don’t need a government! I don’t even believe in taxes, man! And that’s when I realized, Oh fuck, it’s the libertarians.

Fucking libertarians. The whole thesis of populist libertarianism is this: Let’s defund the whole government and hope nothing bad happens. Things will all be fine! It’s just traditional anarchism, rebranded for a Millennial generation. There are some respectable libertarian think-tanks like CATO, which play an important role in our national dialogue, but some of their ideas are just silly.

So I left the Libertarians alone to argue with the approaching Jihadists, and exited that conversation pretty fast.

Just when I thought things could not get any stranger or more ridiculous, I turned away and almost walked right into a group of Amish women, all wearing their traditional dresses and bonnets. Oh my God! I thought, The Amish! Someone get them out of here, they’re going to get hurt!

If the Muslim Brotherhood attacked the Pennsylvania Dutch, I was just going to lose my mind. This day was turning into a parallel-world dystopia novel.

They did not, of course. The Amish passed peacefully through the demonstrations, they walked right past the Jihadists without anyone instigating conflict, and they even paused to look at some of the cardboard memorials hanging up on the chain-link barricades.

I spent the rest of the time reading those memorials myself, and listening in on the quieter debates and conversations that were springing up organically on the sides of the streets and in the encampment of the occupying protestors.

On my way to leave for the fireworks, I overheard a group of young Black girls down the road, I think they were probably school-age kids, and the gist of their discussion was this: Yes, I know things are way better now than they were before. I’m very thankful that our parents fought so that things could be better for us. I love them. But that doesn’t mean we can stop fighting now, because things can still get better. We need to keep fighting.

It made me very happy to hear that from these young kids. If this reveals the spirit of the American people, and their willingness to fight fascism for every half-inch of forward progress, then I think we are going to be okay through all of this.


VII: Fireworks on the National Mall

By the time the fireworks were set to begin at 9:07 P.M. on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., July 4th had already been an exhausting and dramatic day.

It was the night of the full moon and the lunar eclipse, and moreover the moon had the Harvest Moon color to it, shrouded in a dark golden hue that’s almost orange. Shining like the sun through the dark clouds right adjacent to the Washington Monument itself, the whole scene had a magical, fantastical feeling to it — I could hardly have drawn a more surrealist painting of the scene if I was the artist, but this was all God’s work, and it was the most beautiful thing.

Crowds of families and friends — each in their own little group — were spaced out widely across the entire expanse of the lawn. I picked out a spot underneath a young tree, which gave me a clear view of the bright full moon, the monument, and the fireworks.

The soundtrack was so fucking terrible that I scribbled down a note to write something about it in this blog. The acoustics were so grainy that when they blared Over the Rainbow, you could not hear a single word of the song itself, and no one really knew what was going on or where this odd music-like noise was coming from. We were laughing about it with the other groups and making jokes about it — from six feet away, of course.

But seriously, the President of the fucking United States can’t get someone better to work on his sound boards? What is this, a public high school in Oklahoma?

Anyways. The fireworks were spectacular, and the crowd was not too bad, but I was happy to see the Black Lives Matter march right through the National Mall in the middle of the performance. Clanging bells and screaming their slogans, they stole the attention away from the fireworks, and made so much noise that the onlookers had to turn to watch the march instead — and that was just the point of it. They marched right into the President’s own turf, during his personal celebration on the 4th, and they took it away from him, and they gave that moment back to the people.

People jeered their support or disdain for them — it was hard to tell which, it was just a lot of noise — and I shouted my support, but I stopped short of raising my fist. As a White man, the raised fist had mixed signals for me. I had seen it used as an expression of solidarity with our fellow Black Americans, but I had also seen it used as an expression of White supremacy, so I was hesitant to raise it, lest literally anyone think I believe anything and attack me for it. It kind of felt like I was surrounded and considered “suspicious” on both sides.

Honking, by the way, is the same thing — people honk to express support, but they also honk to say Fuck you! White power! So are White men like myself supposed to honk for solidarity, or are we supposed to not honk because that might be misinterpreted as aggression? I still don’t know.

So I expressed my support as cautiously and quietly as I could while the protestors marched — which I hope does not come off as complicity? I am still learning to navigate this awkward position. A lot of other Americans are too, for their own reasons, and we should be receptive to them.

The march went on for half of the show as this endless line of protestors moved from the Washington Monument to the WWII Memorial. They were gone from our area by the time the finale came.

I walked back to my apartment, a full hour’s walk, and no great clash occurred between the right and the left, or the Jihadists and the Communists, or the police and civilians. There wasn’t any incident of violence at all between any of these groups.

So there was a peaceful ending to the night of July 4th, 2020, in Washington, D.C. What could have been a day of violence instead diffused into a passionate shouting match between various groups of different Americans who just do not see things from quite the same view. But that’s okay. That’s what should happen in a functioning democracy. At the end of the day, none of these groups resorted to acts of violence, and that is a good sign for our future as a nation.


VIII: Reflections on a Revolution

I took the next three days to reflect on these events, to learn as much as I could from them, and to write this story to share these events with outside observers.

I did realize something in these reflections. Faced with a complete absence of credible authority — what is, ironically, a power vacuum within a quasi-fascist state — Americans are learning for themselves to negotiate their common identity. They are learning to come out in these streets, and to speak with each other, and to have these very difficult talks about what it means to be a nation, and what it means to revolt, and what is the purpose of that endeavor, what kind of world do we envision which we so passionately believe is so much better than the world we already have? How do we get there from where we are now?

We start by coming out together in these streets, talking to each other, and listening to each other. We start in the same moment when we stop shaming people for who they are or what they came here for. We begin this journey the second we commit to including more Americans in this movement, because it belongs to all of us.

We can build a better country out of this chaos. It will be hard today, and it will be hard next year. But the world — and our children — will thank us for it.

The thought occurred to me — as I moved among these names and faces, these disparate political factions each fighting for control of these streets, fighting to control the direction and the aims of this uprising — that if this is a revolution, it must be only in its infancy. The revolution has not grown into its own self-awareness. It does not know, for example, what it believes in, or exactly what it wants to do when it grows up. It is still in the process of answering these questions, seeking to realize its own self-identity.

It is being pulled in conflicting directions by opposing teams. Each team wants to tell this young revolution who it is, what it should believe in, and what it should do when it grows up.

That is a promising and reassuring thing, but it is also something to be cautious of, because it means that the growing up of this revolution might be shaped by malicious actors who do not want to see it grow into a functional adult capable of existing within a democracy. We need to make sure that we are raising this revolution the right way, which means inviting all Americans to participate in the dialogue.

We need to make more of an effort to reach out to people like the crying girl, to hear their pain, and to tell them: Yes, your dad’s life matters. Your life matters. You matter. We love you. Please join us.

When this movement is mature enough to make that kind of statement, then it will become a revolution. Until then, it is just an idea of something which may or may not ever be.

Matthew R. Bishop

July 4th, 2020

Washington, D.C.

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