Why I Don't Celebrate the Fourth of July
On the hubris and hypocrisy of American exceptionalism
“I…live…in America. Living in America.” Those are the words I hear in James Brown’s voice when I think of Independence Day. It’s the chorus to “Living in America,” the song Brown sings during Rocky IV as Apollo Creed makes his entrance to fight the Russian, Ivan Drago.
Since I was a boy, that scene has captured my imagination of American greatness. There’s the pomp of dancers, lights, and music. The atmosphere dripping in red, white, and blue patriotism. And Apollo Creed, the African American world champion, standing at the center of it, the embodiment of the freedom and greatness of all things America.
As a young boy, this scene was electric every time I saw it. That electricity overflowed into every Fourth of July. This was the day every year I could be like Apollo, celebrating the greatness of America with hot dogs, hamburgers, and my patriotism on full display.
The scene shines the spotlight one last time on the larger-than-life character of Apollo, moments before the Russian mercilessly ends his life in the ring. Apollo’s unexpected death cuts against the myth of him, the legendary world champion, and reveals the reality: a flawed man blinded by his own hubris.
I know that feeling now from the other side of it.
For the first half of my life, I embraced the pomp, the grandeur, the propaganda of American greatness. My grandmother was a Jewish immigrant who believed she’d made it to the modern-day promised land, and she wore that pride like a medal. My grandfather was a lifelong Airman in the Air Force. I have great-uncles who served in WWII, cousins who serve today. My own commitment to the myth ran deep enough that I joined the Navy and deployed twice to the Middle East.
Now, in the second half of my life, I’ve seen behind the ropes. The real America is flawed, full of hubris, still writing the same 250-year story of empire, exploitation, and greed it always has.
I can’t unsee that. That’s why I don’t celebrate the Fourth anymore.
The Myth’s Body Count
The myth says America is a nation built by rugged individuals who pulled themselves up through hard work and grit. The truth is simpler and uglier:
America was built by taking. First the land, then the bodies, then the labor, and now, still, the wages. It’s the same machine wearing a different uniform every fifty years.
Start with the land. Between 1776 and 1887 alone, the U.S. government seized more than 1.5 billion acres from Indigenous nations through treaty and executive order. Not through free enterprise. Not through competition. Through the barrel of a gun and the stroke of a pen, sometimes both in the same afternoon. By the time the seizing was done, Indigenous people in the contiguous United States had lost 98.9% of the land they once held. Ninety-nine percent. That’s not a frontier story. That’s a heist, and the myth just calls it “westward expansion,” or for the more Christian Nationalist flavor “manifest destiny.”
You don’t build a nation on stolen land without something to work it. That’s where chattel slavery comes in, not as a regrettable chapter, but as the engine. How do you make a nation built on stolen land even worse? You enslave an entire people to build said nation on that land. Enslaved people cleared the stolen land, planted it, picked it, and built the wealth that gave the early republic something to be proud of in the first place. The hands changed. The theft didn’t.
When slavery ended, the theft didn’t end with it, it just changed shape again. Sharecropping, convict leasing, company towns, right-to-work laws: each one a new tier of the same tower, keeping labor cheap and desperate long after the chains came off. And that pattern hasn’t stopped. It’s just gone corporate. Over the past several decades, wages for most working Americans have barely moved while the wages of the top 1% grew 182% since 1979, that’s sixteen times faster than everyone else’s.
Which brings us to now. Land theft becomes forced labor. Forced labor becomes wage exploitation. Wage exploitation becomes this: as of late 2025, the richest 1% of Americans held roughly $55 trillion, about as much as the entire bottom 90% of the country combined, the widest gap on record since the Fed started keeping score. Same machine. Same direction. It never stopped running — it just got quieter, and it started calling itself “the economy” instead of “the frontier.”
This is the part American exceptionalism can’t survive looking at directly. It’s not that the country has flaws despite its greatness. The greatness is the flaws, stacked up and compounding for 250 years, increasing the wealth and power of the minority elite while the rest of us scratch and claw for dwindling resources.
The Hero Has Fallen
I was twenty one years old the first time I deployed to the Middle East in response to America’s “War on Terror.” I was barely old enough to drink, I was barely old enough to have voted in my first election, and here I was sitting on the bow of a war ship with two 50 caliber guns guarding an oil rig in Arabian Gulf.
My temperature gauge stopped working at 120 degrees leaving my body in a constant state of perspiration. It was just another day on deployment when we noticed a fishing boat slowly approaching us. We took all the necessary protocols to warn the boat it was getting too close to our ship, it needed to redirect itself away from us, and if kept on its trajectory we would fire upon it. Before firing warning shots the watch confirmed through their binoculars that the boat was filled with women and children, maybe 35-50 people.
We sent a small boarding craft to intercept them with our interpreter who learned the boat was trying to flee to safety and were begging for our help.
But that didn’t happen, despite their pleas, our Captain decided we would give them cheese sandwiches and warn them to stay away from our ship, otherwise we would fire on them. There wouldn’t be front page news highlighting our Christian values in action in a war zone. Here was the chance I’d been waiting for to play my role in continuing the legacy of American heroism on the world stage, a boat full of women and children in need of help, and this is what we gave them.
Admittedly, I was confounded by this decision, if a boat of women and children couldn’t get help from us, who could?
A few hours later I crossed paths with a friend of mine in a hallway. He asked if I remembered that boat that approached the ship earlier in the day. After acknowledging I did, he shared that another war ship just encountered the same boat. This time it was completely empty. A group of pirates in
the area had likely intercepted it and taken all the women and children to who knows where, to do who knows what with them.
My faith in America as the moral compass of the world was shaken but not broken throughout my time in the Navy. Between my experience in the military, an evangelical pastor, and a student of American history, the illusion of American exceptionalism was shattered.
Throwing in the Towel
Apollo didn’t die because Ivan Drago was strong. He died because he couldn’t see past his own hubris. Rocky begged him to see his situation through a sober lens and throw in the towel. Apollo’s mentor Duke saw it happening in real time and couldn’t get through to him. Instead of having the humility to acknowledge the truth, Apollo made Rocky promise he wouldn’t throw in the towel. In the end, Apollo stood in that ring alone, certain that a legend doesn’t need saving, and the myth of the “Master of Disaster” killed him in the center of the ring as the crowd’s applause turned to stunned silence.
That’s the myth America peddles, too. Not just greatness, a specific kind of greatness. The self-made man. The exceptional nation. The hero who doesn’t need anyone, doesn’t owe anyone, answers to no one. Destined by God for greatness. It’s the same story whether it’s told about a boxer, a founding father, or a battleship. And it kills the same way every time: quietly, alone, while the people who could throw the towel in keep believing the legend doesn’t need saving.
I’m not interested in trading one hero myth for a better one. I don’t think the answer is a more honest patriotism, or a more inclusive exceptionalism, or a kinder empire. The whole premise is the rot. What I believe in is smaller and harder to put on a flag: mutual aid instead of empire. Solidarity instead of supremacy. People actually showing up for each other instead of waiting for a nation-shaped hero to do it for them from their mansions or marble halls, or from the deck of a warship handing out sandwiches.
That’s not a lesser vision than the American myth. It’s the only version of it that was ever worth believing in, neighbors helping neighbors, not nationalism but humanitarianism, the mutual survival that this country’s mythology loves to borrow imagery from and never actually practice at scale. Anarchism isn’t the absence of that ideal. It’s the refusal to let empire keep pretending to be it.
Apollo never got to throw in the towel. I did. This July, I’m not celebrating a hero. I’m building something that doesn’t need one.
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