This July Fourth, We Invite You to Recommit to Staying Hopeful

No matter where we come from or who we love, we can all agree that everyone deserves the right to thrive. This July Fourth, we cannot tout or celebrate freedom when too many of us are seeing our freedoms stripped and too many more have never truly been free.

Today’s extremist MAGA Supreme Court Justices have issued crippling rulingsas of late, undoing decades of progress by removing our rights or simply protecting the status quo, neither of which is working for a majority of Americans. According to 2021 census data, 37.9 million Americans were living in poverty, and we know this rate is even higher today with cuts to social safety nets and unnecessary inflation due to corporate greed.

The undue suffering we experience in so many areas of our lives — the lack of affordable housing, sub-living-wage incomes, health-care-related bankruptcy, and so on — is profitable for billionaires, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Our tax dollars and the wealth we bring to this country should support us and our families, not provide tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy.

In so many cases, these MAGA Justices are going against the will of Americans. (See: 61% agree abortion should be legal in all/most cases.) Their decisions are a stark reminder that our freedoms are never guaranteed or simply handed to us.

We know the small few in this country with ungodly amounts of money have bought and paid for the MAGA justices and representatives we see in office today. And they are not ones to simply give us freedoms. It has always been the working class, immigrant and BIPOC communities who have fought for the freedoms and rights that benefit everyone across race, gender, sexuality, income, ability, and so forth. July Fourth is a reminder of that — and a call to protect the freedoms we’ve earned thus far.

Let us honor those who came before us securing our rights, including the right to vote and our right to love and marry as we choose. Now is the time to lean on community groups leading the way to defend affirmative action and student debt relief programs to ensure everyone’s right to a quality education.

Let us maintain hope and come together, because we are stronger in solidarity. We can defeat the billionaire money in our politics, working every day to keep us poor and uneducated. They aim to control the way we love, whether we choose to form families, and whether we can even provide for and be there to enjoy our time with them. It can feel hopeless, but we’ve seen what we can do together.

This July Fourth, we invite you to recommit to staying hopeful. To make the determination to continue to fight. And to continue caring for your fellow Oregonians. ✌️