Despite the extraordinary 250th milestone of our democracy last week and despite the wondrously creative, joyful and unifying observances in every nook and cranny of the country, I couldn’t help but think that this 4th had a different feel from those past.

I can’t recall witnessing quite so many writings and podcasts and informal narratives expressing concern that our 250th seemed less an exercise in constructive remembrance, than an unsettling and disturbing reminder of the divisions, disappointments and excesses of the moment – that, at least at some macro level, the national ethic seemed to substitute the superficiality and contrivance of political gesturism for deep and meaningful analysis of where our country has traveled, where it finds itself and where it’s headed.

It prompted me to return to the speech that Frederick Douglass delivered on July 5, 1852 to the Rochester (NY) Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. It has since been dubbed “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Clearly, that was then and this is now. But Douglas’s analysis of those who don’t find their stories in the celebratory narratives of the 4th seemed hauntingly relevant today.

Douglass begins with a recognition of the undeniable courage and moral clarity of the Declaration of Independence:

[This day] carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act and that day.

But he pivots immediately to the hypocrisy of elevating those ideals when millions are enslaved:

The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.

This is familiar rhetorical territory – a nation’s very founding document is the ultimate indictment of the nation’s barbaric, inhuman behaviors, laws, and norms:

Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.

What was less familiar to me was Douglas’ turn toward the notion of the American “narrative” being so utterly divorced from the American reality – the complicity of institutions whose values point in one direction but whose actions, or inactions, bely them:

To [the enslaved], your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

A deeply powerful and unsettling message. On one hand, discordant with the reality of the countless dimensions of progress we have made over the last 174 years toward a fuller tapestry of civil rights and equitable opportunity. On the other hand, however, disturbingly resonant in the light of bombastic assertions of American hegemony . . . of the stripping of rights from those residing lawfully in our country . . . of legislative capitulation to executive overreach . . . of kleptocracy masking as the legitimate workings of free markets . . . and . . . well, each of us could extend the list.

Douglas urges an awakening:

The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

He closes with a note of hope, arguing that the institution of slavery will eventually be broken by the realities of international interdependence . . . by the spread of knowledge . . . by the fundamental moral instincts of ordinary people.

A powerful reminder yet today of the values to which our 4th should aspire. And an important provocation to consider what such a quickening, such a rousing, such a startling means today – and what it means for Kresge’s work.