America’s Thorns and Roses

Through the thorns, America’s roses keep blooming. Enjoy the long weekend, good people.

The Surf Lodge, captured by Cassell Ferere for CONVICTS

“Metamodernism is characterized by the oscillation between aspects of modernism and postmodernism. It is an attempt to negotiate between enthusiasm and irony, hope and melancholy, naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity.” – Vermeulen & van der Akker, weighty philosophers

“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.” – Abraham Lincoln, America’s GOAT

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Independence Day, huh?

The 4th of July is the American summer’s unofficial zenith. And since none of us have ever fully shaken that schoolday sense that summertime equals break time, it feels right that the season’s apex comes in the form of a long weekend.

Grilling, hanging out, fireworks, playing outside, drinking cold beverages, and sunburn are the soup du jour nationwide.

And these are all excellent things.

But, you know.

With July 4th creeping in this week, there will also be heavier conversations swirling about both sides of the commemorative coin labeled “America’s Soul.”

PTO and partying aside, Independence Day carries some complicated themes that are only getting more complex in 2025. America has angels and demons like no other nation. And both are very much on the move right now.

But isn’t this, in some way, the case for all of us?

A macrocosm of the microcosm of our own human hearts?

Of course, our individual footprints are not America-sized. Our capacity for help and harm is much smaller than the hulking nation we all share. But the truth of the matter is, we all exist in a state of tension between good and bad, selfishness and other-directedness, order and chaos.

Of course, our individual footprints aren’t America-sized. Our capacity for help and harm is a fraction of this hulking nation’s. But if we’re being honest with ourselves—and willing to sit in the psychospiritual discomfort that comes with examining the ways we all fall short of our ideals—the yin-yang of good and bad within each of us becomes obvious.

None of us are all saint. None of us are all sinner.

Sometimes we love America for its ideals, its potential, its dynamism. Other times—especially when unconscionable shit happens in the nation’s name—not so much.

And in that tension, we see our own reflection.