When Celebrating Holidays Feels like Celebrating Erasure: A Reflection

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In celebrating Independence Day with hot dogs, tri-color bunting and spectacles in the night sky, we become players in a national mythology of exceptionalism. The hard edges of our past are buffed to the point of being unrecognizable. This is not unique to the United States, of course, it is a global phenomenon of revisionist stories, markers and memorials, presidential decrees and official holidays designed to turn the page on histories of horror that have never been acknowledged, much less redressed. We must ask the question — at what cost do we celebrate erasure?

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