Last week, because I didn’t want to go across town to a 4th celebration pot luck I usually go to, I was wondering what I would do today. I got invited by a friend to a celebration in Hudson a place I usually love going. But, yesterday something became fully present in myself. That was that I was remembering the 4th of July celebrations when I was a child. It was glaring out to me that, with what is happening now in American society, I was feeling total loss of innocence in reflecting on childhood memories, if not betrayal.  Granted my immigrant family (though they faced discrimination in their own right), never experienced what Native Americans experienced here or people who had great grandparents or grandparents who were slaves (they experienced the same things in other locations–my father going back to the Danube where he rowed as a young man and seeing the bodies floating from the people the Nazis shot along the river at the end of the war or finding out his sister who had fainted and was shot on the way to the camps is not to be taken lightly with himself like others being able to escape to this country), so I have a real sense that, though war, slavery and genocide is not right in any form, it has been the way of the world. But, today, what we are creating in America hurts me to my roots. I have decided to take this 4th of July to meditate and to write. I wish you the finest holiday ever, but I hope when the fireworks go off, even for a few minutes, you think about what that sound is like to those who have experienced war all over the world.