Sara hagale

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I always do an Independence Day drawing, a tribute to my country, but this year is different. The country and the world have been observing a very arrogant form of freedom that is wrought with ignorance—that is proud of ignorance and conflated with it. A freedom that is blind and unaware, and born from that, a sinister, bastardized version of what it means to be an American. The ones who scream in the face of injustice; the ones who wear a mask so that strangers will be able to go home to their loved ones without fear; the ones who will always want a better, more equal and safer version of the America that was sprouted from a document back in 1776—a document that in many ways was a wish more than a reality—those are just some of the people who embody what America is. That’s what freedom means. It’s not selfish. It doesn’t twist rhetoric or laws in a way to benefit one over many. It is the ability to improve. It is the fight against apathy, the insidious enemy of change. In sewing and embroidery, sometimes the thread becomes knotted halfway through a stitch. You have to take time to undo the twisted thread or you cannot continue. A knot is a stop, and for good reason. We are at a knot that was forced through the fabric of our country at the very beginning, residing within the foundation, left unaddressed. Now so clearly seen, it cannot be snipped away or quickly undone. It has to be studied and carefully unravelled. We have to work to reverse the knot, for the sake of our country, our humanity and our future.

A post shared by Sara Hagale (@shagey_) on Jul 4, 2020 at 3:01pm PDT