Independence Day walking tour

Independence Day. When the idea is that not only the nation, but the individual is free "to do their thing," to use that 60's refrain.

But independence, whether national or individual, is always in the context of the social, by which we mean sharing space with others on the planet.

Come along on a walking tour exploring San Francisco social movement history from the perspective that all "othering" is, at base, excluding from equality of access to specific geography, whether a neighborhood, a city, a nation, or the planet altogether.

Your host has been leading this tour since 1998, analyzing the intersection of justice with real estate. Along the way you'll encounter 11 stories of displacement or exclusion that might have been remedied with the Big Fix, proposed here in San Francisco in 1879, to oblige those who want to call a piece of the planet theirs to pay everyone else to stay off.

The Big Fix is no slouch in confronting today's housing, wages, and wealth divide issues, either. Come along and get a load of Independence Day intellectual and spiritual grist.

And here's a bit of Independence slam apropos the wave of bogus biblical political bilge:

INDEPENDENCE DAY, 2024, PHRASED FOR THE BIBLICALLY CONFUSED

Get that poppycock out of your mind.
The exceptionalism of America is staggering,
Born as it was of gobs of land available
For the hewing, and the slaughter of natives.
The hewing and slaughtering are done.
For 250 years—plus or minus a native—
It’s been about enclosure, and that,
God being done with Creating, is that.
Creation is enclosed, and exceptionalism
Now means exclusion of God-given wherewithal
Except upon payment by Earth’s migrant legions,
Foreign and domestic, of Creation rent, due on the 1st.

Don’t blather hard work and family values:
That’s the poppycock you were nursed on,
The pride in identity of AMERICA,
Land of land for the hewing and the inconvenient truth
Of natives needing displacement or euphemistic good riddance.

But wait, I’m no nut-case Jeremiah
(Look that up, you vapid Bible-thumpers);
Call me Jerry-who-never-meanders
From the Biblical truth that God created,
And rent-taking land-lordism is usurpation of the divine.
Independence Day, in short, is nothing less
Than the right to hew Creation, provided I
Leave as much and as good for you.