Activists held a march through downtown Philadelphia on the eve of Independence Day in true recognition of the day of our national independence, and asserting the right of Americans to assemble and voice the will of the nation's cause.
The march crossed notable landmarks across downtown, such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, City Hall, and Independence Hall. While contested by a small and disorganized cavalcade of individuals, the march proceeded and concluded without any harm coming to the activists, or any substantial delays in a safe exit from the marching route.
The activists were briefly halted by armed denizens of the state, who were all too happy to leave the violence-riddled crimescape of a city to its own convulsions while they gloated and posed for interviews. After a emblematic display of bureaucratic incompetence, the police concluded their harassments and the activists completed their task in the city. To face these injustices is to seek not to simply celebrate our national day of independence, but to exercise that freedom we have left, amid the hallowed grounds that once fostered a righteous cause that would ring down the centuries to us.
The wills of the men whose names were first affixed to the documents that would shape a prosperous nation have long since been absent in the streets around which these events occurred. In that city, men of our nation once kindled the flames of revolution, to challenge the might of a global order which had never seen defeat. Treason, it was called, traitors they were in the eyes of foreign rule. It is once again a radical notion, a so-called treasonous thought to say that Americans must dictate America, that our government must have roots in the very nature of our people.
These things have been forgotten. Decades of lies and half truths have been heaped upon the foundation. That which they cannot steal, they twist into a pale imitation meant to placate us into a quiet submission. To make us accept that we are surrounded by the ruins of the world that was once promised to us. Prosperity corrupted into decadence. Liberty violated to the point of self destruction. Sovereignty bent to imperialism.
Days made sacrosanct by the virtuous and revolutionary ought to be honored in the same spirit that made us recognize the fourth. Asserting our right to forge our own national destiny is worth all that we must give and more. Those days of July saw patriots in chains, in mass graves, starved, beaten, robbed of all they had. Yet today the customary tradition is to meekly "celebrate" one revolution, when another's time has come. To conclude anything else, is to abuse what liberties we yet have, given to us steeped in the blood of patriots and tyrants.
In the year that has passed, the fires have not gone out, the blood has not left the streets, the halls of government have not slowed in their mission to see us all as slaves, or corpses. -- Neither have we tired, neither have we forgotten every injustice exacted upon our people and pledged to enact immutable justice, neither will we abandon our cause or see our days absent the work of a revolutionary! To make the men, who will make a nation. To teach the truths that will wake a generation. To bring forward an untarnished beacon of resistance.