Is this truly a day of independence?
Or is it merely a carnival for the unthinking—
a drunken cheer beneath bunting and brass bands,
while the bruises on the faceless remain unseen?
I watched yesterday as a boy—barely twenty-one—
was dragged from a coffee shop.
The steam from his cup still curling in the air
as fists and boots declared their verdict.
They hunted his street with the precision of hounds,
broke into his home as though history itself had given them a key.
They struck his sister, seventeen—
youth and innocence fractured in a moment—
then took turns at his grandfather,
an old man whose only crime was living long enough
to witness the same hatred in a hundred disguises.
They burned the house—
not to ash alone,
but to a warning.
And the sin?
Sitting with a girl whose surname belonged to another prayer.
Tell me then, what is independence?
Is it a passport in the pocket
while the fear in your bones has no expiry date?
Is it a parade on the avenue
while you rehearse, every night,
the safest way to say your name to a stranger?
Is it freedom
if your child learns to walk with their eyes lowered,
their laughter muted,
their identity rehearsed in whispers?
We wrap the word liberty around ourselves
like a flag to keep out the cold—
yet what good is cloth when the soul shivers?
We toast the “birth of a nation”
while the midwives of justice lie dead in the ditch.
We build statues to the idea of freedom
and use their bronze shadows to hide the bodies.
If a man can be beaten for his company,
if a girl’s safety can be forfeited to her brother’s choice of friends,
if the old can be struck down without consequence—
then we are not free.
We are well-dressed slaves.
Slaves who have learnt to polish our own chains
until they gleam like independence.
So I ask again—
and I will keep asking until the question
splinters in the conscience of those who hear it—
is this truly a day of independence?
Or just another year we’ve agreed to forget
what the word means?
