This year of 2020, when we Americans should be celebrating American Exceptionalism—the big difference in America’s founding and history from every other nation on Earth—our great country is riven by rioting, looting, Marxism, ugliness, vandalism. Oh, and also a worldwide pandemic of a virus that originated in Communist China.

Instead of the sound of parades, brass bands playing Stars and Stripes Forever, and laughing children; we hear screams, bullhorns, and the rending sounds of toppling monuments. Instead of praise for the Founding Fathers George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and all the others, we hear praise for career criminals and Marxist fugitives.

The government school systems all across our country have produced a generation of youth who are taught that their country was illegitimately founded by a bunch of nasty bigoted, misogynistic, racist conquerors whose only interest was killing the natives they found and taking over their land. They were taught that the founders of America, because most were White and Male, were, by their very nature unfit to govern the population. They are now being taught that the prime important date in America’s history was 1619, the year that the first “slave ship” docked. And it is those youth who are now engaging in orgies of destruction, motivated by a so-called “Black Lives Matter” movement whose founders are avowed Marxists who despise America and wish to take it down.

We should be looking to all the manifestly great things that America, as founded, has done for those of us fortunate enough to have been born here, as well as the millions of legal (and too many illegal) immigrants who voluntarily left their own countries to seek a more-productive life here in America. Those youth who constantly denigrate America should try spending a year or so in Cuba or Venezuela, and then see how they like it, compared to their pretty cushy life here.

This year in America, Summer has been canceled due to the effects of the Wuhan Coronavirus and the destructive lockdowns perpetrated by the state and local governments. Everyday American citizens have been isolated from their friends and neighbors, schools closed (keeping children from their friends), offices and factories closed (resulting in massive unemployment and business failures), and city streets emptied. The virus did not cause this, the governments did; making policy at the behest of so-called experts whose advice changes seemingly daily.

State governors and city mayors have become drunk with power and they continually increase their decreed control over their citizens. Most of the people of this great nation have become compliant sheep, going around in masks, and obeying every proclamation from their masters. Never before in the history of this country has the economy been nearly totally brought to a screeching halt by any disease. Even smallpox epidemics and the Spanish Flu of 1918 did not see the total shutdown of the economy with all its destruction.

The people of America are tired, angry, and sick of being quarantined. They see massive “demonstrations” against “police brutality”; thousands of people in the streets, with no “social-distancing” or mask-wearing. And when the “new cases” of viral disease spike, they hear no mention of those mass demonstrations as the cause.

And this year, perhaps we fortunate Americans should be thinking of those citizens of Hong Kong, whose previous liberty and prosperity are being taken away by Communist China. Just this week, the Communist Chinese passed a new national security law, given them increased control of Hong Kong, in violation of the Basic Agreement signed in 1989 when Britain ceded control of the island (perhaps now looking like a bad idea). Going forward now, the Communists will be in tighter control, and can arrest and detain Hong Kongers at will and take them back to the mainland for “trial.”

The immediate impact is likely to be suppression of an antigovernment protest movement, whose demonstrations, within a comfort zone that protected rights to publicly question authority, were fueled by widespread public misgivings over Beijing’s growing influence.

The increase in the Communists’ power threatens all that has been beneficial about Hong Kong, including its economic freedom and rule of law. In Communist countries, there is no such thing as rule of law, and citizens can be detained for any reason, for any length of time, with no recourse. Already, bookstore owners and newspaper editors in Hong Kong have been “disappeared” by the Communists, simply vanishing. For about 100 years, Hong Kong has been a haven of economic liberty in Asia, and those days are coming to a close. The US has already declared that Hong Kong is no longer “semiautonomous” and this declaration means that Hong Kong will no longer be treated as a free trading partner. The Communists of mainland China are killing the Golden Goose of their own prosperity.

So, on this Independence Day, all Proud American Citizens should stand up and cheer. Praise this Great Country, sing “God Bless America” or the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and be happy that you were born in the United States of America, the GREATEST COUNTRY ON GOD’S GREEN EARTH.