It's the work of the next 20 years. Good thing I'm only 100.
July 5, 2018 4:30 AM   Subscribe

potofsoup has posted a Captain America birthday comic each year since 2014. This year's features the statue of liberty. posted by Cozybee (6 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
It's funny how history can be now as we face down dark times. The institutions we're losing were hard won and will be hard to win back--it's better to keep them if we can--but they can be made anew even if it will take decades. We know it can be done because it was done once before. That makes a difference.

The road ahead of us is long and hard and overgrown with brambles; in places the wilderness has eaten it away entirely. Walking it will be daunting, and walking it enough to rebuild it to its former glory will not be an easy task indeed. But when our ancestors built it the first time, there were no ruins to extend, no memory of how effectively that road facilitated traffic and life. They had only inhospitable wildnerness. And yet they built a road.

We can do again what they did once. That's all.
posted by sciatrix at 5:57 AM on July 5, 2018 [15 favorites]


Aw, I needed that. Thanks.
posted by Quietgal at 6:56 AM on July 5, 2018


These are great. I wasn't feeling very fourth-y yesterday, but these definitely help.
posted by mark k at 7:00 AM on July 5, 2018 [1 favorite]


Along, similar lines, I find Langston Hughes' poem Let America Be America Again very powerful and inspiring:
...I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
posted by overglow at 7:42 AM on July 5, 2018 [7 favorites]


My tumblr dash was all Cap's 100th bday, all the time yesterday. Here are a few other cute and funny bits of fan art for his birthday: tomorrow's July 4th, don't forget to leave out some milk and cookies for Cap; an unnecessarily long b-day hug; and a present from Bucky.
posted by yasaman at 8:42 AM on July 5, 2018 [3 favorites]


Two pieces of fanfic I was unaware of until today, but that I really appreciate:

Steve Rogers, PR Disaster by idiopathicsmile;

This American Life: A Whole New World by NaomiK, which manages to be fanfic about 4 different universes (only one of which is Captain America's) and an uncanny This American Life tribute.
posted by pykrete jungle at 11:05 AM on July 5, 2018 [6 favorites]


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