I used to say I loved our country’s central values of social justice and equality, that we just needed to heal our old wounds. But with concentration camps caging children on our stolen, poisoned soil–soil first tilled by people brought here in chains–there’s no faking the funk this year. It’s time to admit America has a broken, bloody core.
Even at its inception, U.S. independence was won for a select few at the great expense of many others. Today, a fascist in the White House celebrates that event by parading for a select few at the great expense of many others. Born under the sign of Cancer, these allegedly United States are functioning like a cancer, with greed, capitalism, and unfounded entitlement destroying basic human rights, not to mention the air we breathe. Fuck firecrackers, I’m thinking pyres.
It will surprise no one who reads me that after finishing a film lecture upstate today I couldn’t bring myself to rush back to the city for Pride. Not because I don’t love my LGBTQ+ community but because I am incapable of abandoning a quiet green place for a crowded concrete one–at least before saying hi to every tree and bird in a two-mile radius.
the second pair–a half pair, really–on the curb as I returned to my car.
I love best the people who love what is unlike themselves.* I love the small woman being tugged down the street by her huge wilderbeest of a dog, the two men walking hand-in-hand whom you wouldn’t have placed in the same multiverse, the mother embracing her anomaly of a child. Always the friendships of Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart, Mark Twain and Helen Keller, Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell. That 
Marilyn loved Ella, that Joni loved Prince and Prince loved Joni, that everyone loves the glorious alien Tilda Swinton.