Happy Fourth of July, our national celebration of the time a whole lot of immigrants and their offspring told the guy in charge that they’d had enough of his shit. It’s a great American tradition.

It has become quite hard to celebrate this majestic event when our coward in charge and his underlings in ICE, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, the Republican Senate caucus and their fellow travelers literally are torturing thousands of children and their parents.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, holy shit, pick up a newspaper and stop paying attention to the most-excellent professional liars at Fox. All kinds of horrible things are being done to children in your name, and it does not matter who they are or how they got here.

If you, like many Americans, recognize that we are a nation of immigrants “but our forbearers did it the legal way,” well, do not be so sure. You might be eligible for a refund on your remedial American history class. If your kinfolk came into this country any time after the beginning of the first Civil War, you really should investigate your roots before our federal stormtroopers do it for you. The Real Americans of that time did not care one bit for the Germans, the Irish, the Chinese, Italians, Catholics or Jews. Those people were, according to many of our politicians at that time, a bunch of disease-ridden convicts, rapists, drug dealers, “white slavers” and hookers – and all of them were out to steal your job… and they still are.

Those from south of the American border were put on that list in the early part of the 20th Century, and they’re still getting it in the neck. Our patience for those people who were but three-fifths human and were brought here against their will as property ended when slaveowners no longer had slaves to own, but they already were here so it was easier to lynch them than it was to return them, as if that’s ever been a good idea. Not a lot of American white folk ever picked cotton.

In 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act limiting immigration into the nation was passed and signed by President Arthur. Not only were Chinese prohibited from entering, but those who were here couldn’t visit their relatives on the other side of the Pacific and be allowed reentry into the land of their citizenship. In 1902 every Chinese-American had to obtain a “certificate of residence” or be deported. And our immigration police rarely bothered to differentiate between Chinese and other Asians.

In the 1920s Congress changed the rules once again, setting arbitrary and discriminatory quotas based upon national origin. The Immigration Act of 1924, according to the State Department, “provided immigration visas to two percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the 1890 national census. It completely excluded immigrants from Asia …

“The new law traced the origins of the whole of the U.S. population, including natural-born citizens. The new quota calculations included large numbers of people of British descent whose families had long resided in the United States. As a result, the percentage of visas available to individuals from the British Isles and Western Europe increased, but newer immigration from other areas like Southern and Eastern Europe was limited.”

To employ the vernacular, Asians, Italians, Catholics and Jews were fucked. If your roots run through those grounds or if your family is of Hispanic origin, you might not be the issue of legal immigrants.

These quotas were abolished in 1965, replaced by a system that ostensibly considered each individual’s skills and their family relations with citizens or U.S. residents. That made the situation a little bit better… assuming you were white. There wasn’t much improvement for people of color, no matter how many bona fide American citizens were in your family.

I would like to remind you about that “individual’s skills and their family relations with citizens or U.S. residents” part. Most, if not all, of the children presently kept in cages and deprived of half-way decent food, bathing, soap, clothing or serious medical care have family relations with citizens or U.S. residents.

And I have yet to meet a two-year old drug dealing pimp rapist.

This is what America is today. A nation that empowers rabid hate-mongers, embraces American Nazis, reestablishes the likes of the Ku Klux Klan, encourages violence against “minorities” and has perfected the art of virtual goose-stepping. What goes around, stays around. We are the home of the free white people, the land of the brave, paranoid and stupid xenophobes. You know, the “greatest nation in the history of the world.”

That doesn’t say much for the world, does it? We are allowing the torture of children and their parents. About 40% of the American population has pissed on any claim to humanity.

Yeah. Happy Quatro del Julio, motherfuckers.