Happy 250th birthday, America, and Witching You a Happy Interdependence Day
- 14 hours ago
- 8 min read
Ken Breniman is a queer author, licensed clinical social worker, yoga therapist, and thanatologist guiding fellow mindful mortals at the threshold of life, death, devotion, and (r)evolution. His work blends neuroscience, primatology, Celtic wisdom, and psychedelic integration to invite braver ways of being human.
Happy 250th birthday, America. I am casting this blessing as a patriotic American who is also a grief therapist, death doula, social worker, queer author, ancestral worshipper, and pink magic practitioner: Happy Interdependence Day. Yes, I know the calendar still reminds us that July 4 is known as Independence Day. The fireworks crack open the sky. The grills smoke. The flags wave. Children look up in wonder as adults try to tell a simple story about a nation that has more nuance than some are willing to admit.
But maybe, now that America is turning 250, we are ready for a glow-up. Not an extra coat of red, white, and blue paint over the same haunted house. I mean a civic, soul-level glow up, the kind that asks a nation to say, I am not only what I hoped to be. I am also what I have harmed. Still, I may become better.
That is the spell I am casting. Not a curse. Not a hex. Not a hoax. Just a pink-hued, heart-centered wish for a country I still love enough to challenge.
This is pink magic: fierce, tender, grief literate, historically aware, glitter-stained when necessary, and unwilling to confuse patriotism with obedience.
In my award-winning speculative science fiction novel, A Three-Body Solution, the future is brighter than some dare imagine, and Interdependence Day becomes the natural way humanity celebrates. The Fourth of July becomes less about fierce separation and more about what Thich Nhat Hanh called interbeing: the truth that nothing exists by itself alone. To be is to inter be.
That is not only fiction. That is survival. My wish is simple: May America learn to coexist rather than fiercely proclaim independence as if independence alone could save us.
Independence helped us imagine freedom from tyranny. But independence, left unevolved, becomes loneliness with weapons. It becomes rugged individualism that forgets the soil, the worker, the immigrant, the enslaved, the Indigenous, the queer, the disabled, the poor, the unpaid, and the living planet that made survival possible.
Independence can become a spell too. Not all spells heal. Some isolate. Some inflate. Some turn neighbors into threats, borders into altars, and flags into blindfolds.
So on this 250th birthday, I am wishing America something deeper than another loud performance of freedom. I am wishing us the wisdom of interdependence.
Interdependence is inevitable. It is not a yoga mat slogan. It is the architecture of reality. Every breath is borrowed from trees and plankton. Every meal is an agreement between soil, labor, weather, and survival. Every elder reminds us that needing one another is not failure.
The question is not whether America will become interdependent. We already are. The question is whether we will become conscious of it before our denial destroys what remains.
I have felt this beyond our bounded borders. Through book tours, conversations, and travels to Borneo, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Uganda, and beyond, I have met people who hold complicated tenderness, fear, frustration, and hope toward America. Again and again, I have heard the same wish: May America grow up. May America wake up. May America glow up. May America learn to live with the world rather than loom over it.
Many of us are speaking up. Not because we hate America, but because we refuse to let America become a hostage situation disguised as patriotism.
James Baldwin wrote, “Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.” He also wrote, “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without.”
America, my dramatic, dazzling, dangerous, wounded, powerful, adolescent, visionary, avoidant, miracle-making country, it is time to take off the Ameri mask.
The mask says we were born innocent. We were not. The mask says this nation began only as a noble search for a better world. It did not.
The mask says the founding was simply about liberty, courage, and self-determination. It was about those things. It was also about land theft, Indigenous genocide, enslavement, racial hierarchy, gendered exclusion, economic extraction, and a national imagination that declared “all men are created equal” while denying the full humanity of millions.
That contradiction is not a footnote. It is the foundation. Just like yin and yang, I believe this contradiction contains the seeds of how a nation glows up.
I write these words from a caring, loving, patriotic place. I love this country enough to want it to stop harming itself. I love this country enough to want it to coexist with the rest of the world instead of trying to dominate it. I love this country enough to say that what we are doing right now is not sustainable. We are running old software on a burning planet.
I say this as a poor, Pennsylvania-born, German Irish American who did not first learn about slavery through meaningful education. No. I was introduced to slavery through participating in a high school slave sale fundraiser.
A slave sale. In high school. As a fundraiser. In the 1980s. Students participated. Teachers allowed it. Families knew. Nobody, at least not loudly enough for me to hear, said: Absolutely not. We do not make a game out of human bondage.
That silence taught me quite a bit. For starters, it gave me a jarring glimpse into the caste system hiding in plain sight in the United States.
Caste does not always announce itself with a hood or a torch. Sometimes it smiles from the center of the room, dressed up as tradition, a joke, a school event, a fundraiser, a shrug, or a casual “we did not mean anything by it.”
Meaning is measured by impact, history, power, repetition, and what a community asks its children to normalize before they have the language to resist.
I do not tell this story to center myself in America’s racial wound. I was not the one most harmed. But I was shaped by it. I was initiated into whiteness through silence.
That is how caste survives: not only through hatred, but through habit, politeness, curriculum gaps, nostalgia, and cowardice masquerading as civility.
Isabel Wilkerson, in Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, writes, “Caste is the bones, race the skin.” Race may be what America taught itself to see, but caste is the deeper ranking system, the hidden scaffolding, the old spell that assigns human value before anyone speaks.
That is why “Happy Interdependence Day” is not just a cute twist of language. It is an invocation. A civic ritual. A pink magic interruption of the old enchantment that says we are separate, superior, self-made, and somehow entitled to survive without changing. It is not a misspelling of a seasonal greeting. It is a spell for a nation becoming.
Interdependence proclaims this: I am not free from you. I am responsible with you. My liberation cannot require your disappearance. No child is disposable. No elder is in excess. No species is irrelevant. No river is merely a resource. No nation is an island, even when surrounded by oceans.
The myth of fierce independence has left too many Americans lonely, armed, exhausted, suspicious, and spiritually undernourished. That is not freedom. That is abandonment with a motivational soundtrack.
Freedom without responsibility becomes extraction. Freedom without truth becomes propaganda. Freedom without care becomes cruelty. Freedom without interdependence becomes a lonely empire pacing inside its own mythology.
Let us glow up, show up, and be honest: the empire is not well. Empire may throw grand parades, build massive structures, announce itself in booming voices, and even stage professional wrestling spectacles to prove it is not the fading Roman Empire. But the irony is hard to miss. A culture trying that hard to prove it is not collapsing may already be asking the wrong question.
America does not need to be an empire to be worthy. America does not need to dominate the planet to matter. Perhaps the next great American evolution is not more power, but more relationship, honesty, humility, repair, and willingness to learn. That would be a glow up. That would be pink magic. That would be revolutionary.
Imagine an America that could apologize without collapsing, teach its children the truth without fearing they would love the country less, and stop asking, “How do we win?” long enough to ask, “How do we coexist?”
Love does not behave in the face of dehumanization. Love interrupts. Love testifies. Love dances where silence was demanded. Love glitters at the gates of empire. Love whispers to the frightened child inside the nation: You do not have to keep hurting people to prove you exist.
I wish America well, but not passively. I wish America a healing crisis, a moral awakening, fewer masks, more polished mirrors, and the wisdom to know that interdependence is not the opposite of freedom. It is freedom’s grown-up form.
That is a different kind of patriotism: not flag worship, not national narcissism, but devotion with a backbone, love with a library card, grief with its sleeves rolled up, and hope with work boots.
That is where I stand: poor, Pennsylvania-born, German Irish, queer, primate-loving, grief-tending, pink magic-practicing American trying to tell the truth without giving up on love.
Spells are not only words. Spells are repeated actions. A nation is spellbound by what it repeats. A spell is not a prettier version of “thoughts and prayers.” It is intention disciplined into action, repeated until a new pattern becomes possible.
If we repeat domination, we become dominated. If we repeat denial, we become denial. If we repeat cruelty, cruelty becomes culture. But if we repeat care, perhaps care becomes policy. If we repeat the truth, perhaps the truth becomes the curriculum. If we repeat the repair, perhaps the repair becomes normal. If we repeat interdependence, perhaps the lonely spell begins to break.
Interdependence is inevitable. The only question is whether we will practice it consciously or suffer it chaotically. I would rather practice. I would rather bless the nation into maturity. I would rather cast pink magic toward a future where America becomes less obsessed with being great and more committed to being good.
Good to its people. Good to the planet. Good to the rest of the world. Good to the children watching us. Good to the ancestors who deserved better. Good to the future that is still deciding whether to trust us.
May your fireworks become less about conquest and more about awe. May your flags become less about possession and more about responsibility. May your classrooms become places where truth is taught with courage. May your leaders remember humility. May your people remember one another.
From one patriotic queer who still wants to love the flag without lying about it: America, I witch you well. May freedom’s next verse be sung in the key of belonging, and may your next 250 years be guided by the spell of sacred interdependence. Pink magic spell complete.
Read more from Kenneth J. Breniman
Kenneth J. Breniman, Grief Guide & Mindfully Mortal Therapist
Ken Breniman is a queer author, licensed clinical social worker, certified yoga therapist, and thanatologist whose work lives at the intersection of mortality, meaning, and transformation. Drawing from neuroscience, primatology, Celtic wisdom, and psychedelic integration, he challenges the myth of human exceptionalism while honoring the precious role each of us plays in the ongoing evolution of our species. Ken is the author of a three-body solution and subversive acts of humanity, and the creator of the See-Soul children’s grief literacy series. Through writing, teaching, and ritual-informed practice, he guides mindful mortals toward deeper humility, resilience, and collective becoming.
