Stuck between the idea and an ideal, somehow despite the advantages and privilege still remains elusive. I’m talking about our country, the United States, the great democratic experiment. It has never been perfect, and it has been idealized by the patriarchal class. It began, and remains today in many places and situations, with white men, landowners with money, wifely support, servants and slaves. That slavery was written into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, an irony and a tragedy if ever there was one. In thirty-four days is a celebration that I would normally be looking forward to, but the state of our government and the administration currently in charge is making it increasingly more difficult to get behind a “celebration” or an honoring of what we have been and what we are becoming.

How is this related to mental health?

Mental health awareness month officially ended yesterday, but our mental health awareness must continue – the awareness of how we’re feeling, how people make us feel, what triggers us, and how to cope with those triggers. At our house, we have four flags in the front along with a pride flag. I left the US flags displayed in honor of our fallen for Memorial Day. I’ve decided to remove them for June. I think Flag Day has been coopted by the current president as his birthday party, and I will not participate in that. At all. I plan to replace the flags for July 4^th weekend and then remove them again until Election Day.

I feel for the people who say we have nothing to celebrate. Sometimes I believe that, but sometimes I see what good happens when people do good; without the cameras rolling, without the benefits of being seen, without heaped upon praise, simply acting because that is the right thing to do. That is what I believe this country can be. I was raised that way, and I hope I’ve raised my kids that way. The ideal of the idea of the US is the melting pot, the blending of many into one – e pluribus unum.

I’ll ignore the circus in Washington, D.C. for the next few weeks, although I won’t ignore the harm they’re doing, the persecuted, the shamed, the bigotry and racism abounding currently, and acknowledging this is nothing new, we’ve always had this. We’ve hoped for the best, and I hope and pray that we can rebuild, not rebuild what we had, but a stronger foundation, a stronger, more equal place for the world to come and to look to as my great-grandparents did, as my mother-in-law did. I want us to be what we can be, what we should have been all along.

I have memories of the Bicentennial, and I am going to make memories for the 250^th. I want my kids to look back in another fifty years for the three hundredth birthday and see how far we’ve come. I can hope. I can encourage.

Regardless, take your mental health temperature, and see what you want out of the next few weeks, how you want to celebrate or ignore our country’s founding, how you can stay on your recovery course in the best possible way. Make your coping tools available so when triggered you have the mental space to reset. First and foremost, take care of you.

And for my own mental health, I can ignore Washington’s circus monkeys through this birthday and then get back on the protest wagon and fight for our democracy, repair what they’ve destroyed (including the Rose Garden and the East Wing and the Voting Rights Act and Roe v. Wade), and rekindle a better place for all of us. I have faith. We can do it. We can.