America’s Independence Day holiday falls on Wednesday smack dab in the middle of the week, so a lot of people are taking the entire week off.
America’s Independence Day holiday has lost much of its context over the last 220 years. Unlike many African countries, for example, there is no living memory of Independence, just what the books tell us.
Many of us are specially less eager to celebrate the holiday, because of the terrible divisions our constitution causes today. Almost all the political divisions of our country stem either from your embrace of the 18th Century constitution, or your criticism of it.
Unlike most countries in the world it’s near impossible to change our constitution. To do so is a difficult two-step process.
The first step is simply to “propose” a change, known as an “amendment.” This requires a two-thirds vote of both chambers of our legislature, or a two-thirds vote by a convention called separately by The States.
Once an amendment is proposed, it will only become law when three-quarters of the States ratify it. States have different rules for what constitutes ratification, but in all cases it’s at the very least a majority vote by both chambers of the State legislature then approved by the State’s executive (governor).
So changing the constitution is virtually impossible. It’s the central reason America is becoming so conservative in a world that is becoming increasingly progressive.
Merry-making this year is doubly hard given who is our current president and how juvenile and corrupt our legislature has become.
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British and Americans a century ago thought Kenya would become a major cotton producer, thought hippos ate bushes (they don’t), and were shooting so many elephants that most of the large tuskers were already gone.
Early each morning I submerge myself in African news. Until this year I struggled with my arrogance, checking possible pretensions about honesty and fairness that Africans were presumed lacking. That’s flipped. I fear the morning, now:
Rocket Man Wars, Syria bombs, trade wars, bad speech, forgotten manners or even intentional rudeness, stupidity, neglect then lying if conspiracy … yes this is America to the rest of the world, but to Africa this morning, our treatment of children makes us monkeys. Monkeys take babies away from one another.
Rwanda was first: hike the hourly fee for visiting a mountain gorilla to $1000. Tanzania followed: Two years ago the fee was $35/day in the Serengeti. Today (linked to where you’re staying), it’s $100.
Don’t be misled by the notion that war arrives as a gigantic catastrophic event, a North Korean slip for example. War can escalate as secretly and effectively as a gang of boomslang snakes slinking into the shed.
The “American nation [is] complicit in the demise of its own democratic well-being,” 
Jacob Zuma and Donald Trump have been compared to one another by many whose blogs get more readership than mine: Trevor Noah, 
The Maasai of East Africa, the Rohingya of Myanmar and even the 4th generation Rhodesian farmers of Zimbabwe are inhumanely imprisoned in modern societies incapable of figuring out how to assimilate them.
Wonder if we’re in a new cold war? Take a look at how Africa responded to the opening of the new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem yesterday.
Well now, social media – this same Facebook that you’re now using – may be the most powerful political tool on earth. Kenya President Uhuru Kenyatta has even bettered Trump tweets 
Trump’s recent White House meeting with Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, got little attention here. But from an African perspective it set human society back almost to the time of the Crusades.
Fear, uncertainty and a growing distrust of America spread across sub-Saharan Africa last night as it grew more and more evident how crippled a number of African countries might become as a result of Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran Nuclear Dear.