Birthday Candles for a Corpse

They fire up grills, sing anthems, and toast to “freedom.” But it’s not freedom they’re celebrating anymore. It’s a memory. A myth. Maybe a mirage

Every July, the fireworks come out. Americans on the 4th, Canadians on the 1st — both proud of their flags, their founding stories, their declarations of liberty. They fire up grills, sing anthems, and toast to “freedom.” But it’s not freedom they’re celebrating anymore. It’s a memory. A myth. Maybe a mirage.

The hard truth is this: we are less free now than the people who walked these lands before a single flag was planted.

The Founding Fathers — all those powdered wigs and quill pens — would be horrified by what’s become of their “noble experiment.” Surveillance, censorship, bureaucracy stacked like bricks on a man’s back. You can’t buy raw milk without a raid team showing up. You can’t speak freely without a mob or a ban. You can’t live off-grid, trade with your neighbor, or teach your kids outside the state’s gospel without being flagged as a threat.

They would look around and ask: What was the war for?

And meanwhile, the people they once called “savages” lived with more liberty than any settler ever tasted. No income tax. No standing armies. No zoning boards or pharmaceutical cartels. Just a covenant with the land, mutual obligation, seasonal councils, and spiritual self-rule. Freedom wasn't something to declare — it was how you lived. How you ate. How you governed. How you buried your dead and raised your children.

And maybe, just maybe, we all would’ve been better off if we’d joined forces — not in some assimilationist fantasy, but as co-conspirators in a real culture of liberty. But instead of that, they chose conquest. They chose to civilize us by erasing us. And now they call it reconciliation while they tag us with QR codes and carbon footprints.

The irony? Most of us — native or not — would kill to live as freely as our ancestors did. Before paperwork. Before passports. Before everything was plastic and permissioned.

The further this system slides into digital dependency and synthetic culture, the more every act of tradition becomes an act of resistance.

So go ahead and light those fireworks if you must. Raise a toast to the dead republics. But know that the real revolution is quieter. It smells like smoke and soil. It comes from people who remember who they are. And it doesn’t need permission.

Some of us are starting to remember. Not just through politics, but through practice. Through the way we eat, heal, and trade. Through the return to the land and the old crafts.

Darren Grimes

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P.S.

Like hand-rendered tallow, now available Through Indigenous Opinions — real, nourishing fat the way our grandmothers used it. Not the synthetic junk that lines drugstore shelves. The kind that smells like the animal still matters. You won’t find it in some neon-branded bottle made in Shenzhen. You’ll find it with people who still care where things come from.