The Wounds of Ancestors
Reflections on July 4th in 2020
When my great-grandfather came to this country as a teenager,
an eastern European Jewish immigrant fleeing persecution and seeking opportunity in the early 1900’s,
he declared July 4th, of the year he arrived here, was his birthday.
He loved this country, and his family has flourished here.
Every day I see the gifts in my life that have come from the hard work of my ancestors,
and the wealth of this continent.
I listened to the Declaration of Independence on the radio yesterday.
Did the slave owners, land speculators, and business tycoons that wrote it understand its absurdity?
Do we understand it today?
What did that document sound like back then?
Today, in the light of two and half centuries of history
veiled beneath a veneer of egalitarianism and righteousness
it reeks of entitlement and projection,
hypocrisy, racism, greed,
Perhaps the trauma of the violence of colonialism
Dulled their senses and numbed their hearts
to their own barbarism.
Just as it does to us today.
Along with their gifts,
the wounds of our ancestors become ours.
