Mourn on the Fourth of July. Watching President Trump’s Yankee Doodle extravaganza at Mount Rushmore, he and his unmasked audience under the stony gazes of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt, I was taken back to two points in the past.

The first was the summer of 2011, when Leslie and I visited the monumental monument in the Black Hills of South Dakota. We were then about midway through our Florida Keys to Arctic Ocean road trip commemorated in my travel memoir, The Longest Road. After setting up camp near the town of Interior, we had spent some time on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, site of the Wound Knee massacre in 1890, hiked in the Badlands, and later met a remarkable man, Ansel Woodenknife. Ansel bridged white and Native American cultures: a Lakota sun-dancer and shaman, he was also an entrepreneur who had started a chain of restaurants offering fry-bread tacos and who served on the South Dakota tourist board. At one point in our nearly night-long conversation, he said something I’ll always remember: “I’ve never lost the fact that I’m a free person. The government may hate me because I’m an Indian, but my ancestors walked freely, and by God, if it kills me, I’ll walk freely too.”

His words came back to me as CNN showed Sheriff’s deputies clearing the road into Mount Rushmore of Lakota activists protesting Trump’s campaign rally. To their and Ansel’s forebears, the Black Hills were as sacred as the Vatican is to Roman Catholics. The tall poles used in the Lakota Sun Dance were harvested from its forests. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 promised the Black Hills to the Lakota for as long as the grass grew and the rivers flowed. The grass did grow and the rivers flowed, but when gold was discovered in the mountains in the 1870s, the Lakota were pushed out and their land seized. More than a century later, in a 1980 Supreme Court decision, the taking of the Black Hills was ruled illegal and the Lakota were offered $106 million in compensation. The tribe refused the settlement. Although the fund, invested in an interest-bearing account, is now worth nearly one billion, they still refuse. They want the Black Hills returned to them. So it was, as the  protestors were led away in handcuffs, a Trump supporter yelled, “Go home!” and a Lakota turned to him and said, “This is  home.”

The second point in time was in 1978, when the cult leader, Jim Jones, ordered the mass suicide of 918 of his followers in the infamous Jonestown Massacre in the South American nation of Guyana. The members of Jones’s People’s Temple, mesmerized by their charismatic self-styled Reverend, obediently gulped grape Kool-Aid laced with cyanide. Three hundred and four of them were children.

Fast forward to July 3, 2020. The 7,500 people attending Trump’s festival were told that face masks were optional and that social distancing was not be practiced, despite the upsurge of Coronavirus in 36 states. With but a handful of exceptions, they obeyed these summons from their cult leader and sycophantic disciples like South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, who had declared on Fox News that they were being asked to  “to come, to be ready to celebrate, to enjoy the freedoms and liberties we have in this country. We won’t be social distancing.”

Apparently, those freedoms and liberties include the freedom to behave recklessly, endangering other people, as well as the liberty to get sick and possibly die themselves. Not wearing masks and crowding together were the Kool-Aid and cyanide in the Trump temple.

Meanwhile, back here in Connecticut, the state’s oppressive government has mandated social distancing and masks in public places, and started a robust campaign of testing and contact tracing. We are all of us here groaning under these tyrannical measures, yearning for the freedoms folks in South Dakota are enjoying. It’s true that Connecticut’s hospitalizations for the virus have dropped to a four-month low, and positive new cases are now below one percent. But what is that compared to our lost liberties? I’m going to protest these onerous restrictions and exercise my Constitutional rights when I go to my brother and sister-in-law’s place for a holiday cookout tonight. I am going to drive the wrong way down a one-way street at sixty miles an hour. Live Free or Die! No, make that, Live Free and Die!