Reclaiming red.

This summer, the 4th of July passed as fast as fireworks.

A momentary celebration, but these days it's hard to even call it that.

It all felt different this year. Jokingly, we called it "The last summer". But as the days grew hotter, the joke stopped being funny. And started to become a warning.

With the rise of Americana aesthetics over the years, I've been pondering the implications of red.

Unlike blue and white, red and its vibrancy have been instilled in my head. A bold, brash, out-there color, one on stupid weaponized T-shirts, and one in our American flag.

Since Trump's attempt at aestheticizing his politics, his MAGA line has done immeasurable damage to the American psyche. So much so that anything red with little wording makes me do a double take. The struggle between fashion and politics has made me look at the way we dress differently.

Fashion matters; it tells a story just as much as it can control one. When we talk about the reworking of Americana aesthetics into today's trends and fashions, we can't skip over the American flag's importance in these images and what it aims to say. When Trump waves the flag, it lacks meaning; it feels flat and vain.

When I see the red he's spread across the country, I acknowledge that he's taken it's meaning. The thing I won't let him take: the American flag.

If you asked me six years ago what that flag meant to me, I wouldn't have had a good answer for you. But with time on our hands, and not on our side, something replaced my lack of response with anger, fear, and doubt.

Red represents power and sacrifice.

In Juneteenth tradition, the color red symbolizes the bloodshed and enduring resilience of the enslaved African Americans whose free labor built this country into prosperity. They bled and sacrificed for their promised freedom.

Trump might've conned his way to power, but the only thing he sacrifices for this country is its citizens.

We want so badly to not acknowledge it, but all that does is drive us into darkness.

When the enslaved got their freedom, when they survived and thrived and lived to build a future, that was the "greatness" of America. It was every union that fought for their safety and rights; it's in the educators and doctors advocating for Americans against corporations and government intrusion.

As I reframe what it means to me, I think of every battle fought to grant us the possibility of freedom, and every life lost, forgotten, and washed away in the mechanics of politics and history.

We can't let their efforts be for nothing, and so we must not give up on America just yet.

America isn't great because of its whiteness; it's great because despite the powers that be that may seem greater, the people, a melting pot of different cultures, religions, backgrounds, and histories, believe in the power they hold. The power to change what doesn't work, the power to change, to become better.

The world has gotten so dark lately; people are more prepared for its end than to dream up a new beginning.

The way we view the country has to change, so that when we pick the people who will lead it, it's not out of fear or complacency, but out of an honest attempt at a better future.

250 years in the grand scheme of humanity isn't that long. When we speak about innovation and empires, our generation is at a standstill.

How much can we do when there's already so much going into just trying to survive?

Rent, groceries, and healthcare are at an all-time high, and lord help you if you have student debt.

Maybe we find hope where they used to place anger. Where they don't want you to look: History.

The revolution made Americans. We saw something wrong and together made a plan to fix it.

During the American Revolution, Loyalists pledged obedience, while Patriots built the resistance against the outdated systems that had withheld them from true liberty.

After the Stamp Act and the Tea Act, the British suppressed the people's attempts at protest (The Intolerable Acts), and they rebelled. The crown may change, but the fight stays the same.

The "patriots" on the street are nothing like the real ones.

They are leftover relics from failed and dying ideologies that have lived on like cockroaches in the foundation of America. They are nationalist cowards, given a platform by just as cowardly men. They wave our flag and claim an "America first" position, and we just listen and let them, but they are liars. Our flag means more than that, and it means more than them.

Just because they fly it doesn't mean they own it.

When a leader in great power doesn't know how to lead, he becomes a liability.

Trump is America's liability. A sour reflection of our nation's separation over the past decade. A con man taking advantage of a crumbling system, he has stripped it for parts and sold it to the highest bidders. The American people have been sold out.

While we beg for change before it's too late, the rich begin investing in their next round of election manipulation. Billionaires have already poured more than $433 million into the 2026 midterms. Billionaire families, and anyone else willing to buy in, get a ticket to democracy.

If money “puts you in the room” of democracy, how free are we really? As data centers are being planned under our noses, AI-related super PACs spent more than $50 million on 2026 races, including a $27 million proxy war between Anthropic- and OpenAI-aligned groups. If politicians are willing to sell out our country in favor of a check, what do the rest of us do if we don't have millions to decide our fate?

As I lay awake, scrolling articles on the rise of "techno-feudalism", a new world made from the old one, this time where billionaires and tech giants control everything while we are rented out our own existence; warnings about tyranny on the rise as Trump comes off of his richest year yet as president, meanwhile 63% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck; Trying to erase the feeling that this could get worse. I replace it with: it gets worse before it gets better. Better has to come soon.

When we see the USA through the lens of nationalism, it becomes hard to be proud of something that isn't true.

An ordered society requires accountability, but "cancel culture" is a joke now, and those in power believe themselves above the people. How far will they go to test the limits of what that means, when no one will stop them?

New ways of leveraging our power emerge as we reject the finite ways of imagining reality.

who says you can't reshape the world? They do it every day.

After all, summer is a revolutionary time.

The calvary of the men and women who have given their lives in pursuit of democracy, from the summer of 1776, when the thirteen colonies declared independence while Britain set sail to crush the rising rebellion, to the summer of 1964, when across the nation hundreds of college students, activists, and community leaders mobilized to challenge voter suppression. They provided education and helped register black voters in Mississippi despite the major suppression from the government and violence that tried to stop them.

Before the war, while thoughts flurried in the air, dreams of a new world gained more weight in reality, and Founding Father John Adams wrote a dissertation on the canon and the feudal law in 1765.

In it he writes, "Rulers are no more than attorneys, agents, and trustees for the people; and if the cause, the interest and trust, is insidiously betrayed, or wantonly trifled away, the people have a right to revoke the authority that they themselves have deputed, and to constitute abler and better agents, attorneys, and trustees. And the preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks, is of more importance to the public than all the property of all the rich men in the country." He wrote as a protest to the British Stamp Act, more followed, and public opinion began to turn.

We can’t re-write the past, there is only today and tomorrow, an imperfect vision of America, prime for new dreamers.

One day I want to show my children and grandchildren the beauty of this place I call home. I want to show them the vast richness of America's natural beauty, all my favorite cities and museums; I want to tell them our history, and I want to show them all the ways we failed, so they can see all the ways we won.

I want them to dream of their own futures without fear that there won’t be one.

I want them to know the only way you lose is if you stop trying, and that the world needs people who try.

We can't change it all in one summer or a generation, but we can be relentless in our pursuit. The moment we release the reins of our humanity to those who believe themselves powerful enough to take it, is when we lose.

Our flag is represented on picket lines, and rallies, and marches for freedom. It's the people on battlefields of wars they can't get out of, it's the essential workers that got us through the pandemic, it's the volunteers at the food bank down the street, it's the teachers that stick around; It's the neighbor you don't know, yet.

The fight is in how you vote and speak with neighbors, community leaders, etc.

It’s the money, time, and resources back into your community while we vote and fight out politicians harmful to the new American dream. Whatever that might be.

At our greatest, it is the brokenness and the resilience to keep going anyway.

I'm trying to love it again, in the true American way, as an act of resistance, and honoring the land of the free.