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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
Write about independence. There are so many different angles to take this prompt, I’m eager to see your creativity!  Independence is a myth. The word "myth" gets tossed around a lot, and it's one of those words that has different meanings, depending on context. It could mean a falsehood, or a partial falsehood, like the pervasive idea that glass is a slow-moving liquid (it's not; its only resemblance to a liquid lies in its noncrystalline, or amorphous, atomic structure; now you know). Or it could mean a foundational story, true or not, like the tale of Romulus and Remus and the she-wolf, or George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. By "independence is a myth," I mean the latter. Today is the Fourth of July, Independence Day here in the US, some 243 years since we told King George III to kiss our fat white asses. Said fat white asses proceeded to kick England's fat white asses and then continued to enslave and/or genocide a lot of non-white asses. So right there, it wasn't exactly "independence" for everyone. To do this, we banded together in a union of, nominally, 13 former colonies or "states," united, each depending on the other 12 to help them keep their shit together. Interdependence, right there. Join, or Die.  Nowadays, of course, the UK is one of our closest allies, so I guess everything worked out in the end, to the extent that anything actually ends. We get to make fun of their silly accents, and they get to make fun of our fat multicolored asses. Freedom. I suppose there's something to be said for self-determination, but really, how fine a sieve can we use for that? I mean, right now, a good half of the population of the country thinks our government is run by the wrong people. After the next elections, the other half might think our government is run by the wrong people. In theory, we all have a say in this; in practice, we have about as much control as a Brit does over who sips tea in Buckingham Palace. Get any two people together, and you're going to have trouble deciding on pizza toppings, let alone how a country should be run. Get 300 million people together, and that problem is exponentially intractable. So, we compromise, we cooperate, we argue, and we stare at a flag while saying words like "indivisible" and "liberty" and "justice," and pretend that these concepts have meaning. Like "independence." Funny thing is, though, if you pretend a concept has meaning for long enough, and write enough words about it, and argue for or against it, and even go to war over it... well, then it does have meaning. Could be a different meaning for everyone, but it's a meaning. It raises it from idea to concept to story to myth - not falsehood, but foundation. Like how the story of George Washington and the cherry tree speaks to the core value of honesty, it gives us something to hold on to, to strive for, even if we can never really get there. And we can't. We're all dependent, to some degree or another. No one is an island - and even if they were, an island is still dependent on a relatively constant sea level, without which it ceases to exist. (Yes, I just made a snide comment about climate change.) But hey, we don't have hereditary royalty telling us what to do, so I suppose that's something. Of course, neither does England these days. Well, royalty, sure, but they don't really command anyone who isn't a Corgi. |
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