Surviving the Fourth of July

I survive the degradation that has become America -- a land that exalts itself as a bastion of freedom and liberty while it tortures human beings, stripped of their rights, in offshore penal colonies, a land that wages wars defined under international law as criminal wars of aggression, a land that turns its back on its poor, its weak, its mentally ill, in a relentless drive to embrace totalitarian capitalism -- because I read books. I have 5,000 of them. They line every wall of my house. And I do not own a television.