“And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all” -Colson Whitehead, author of “Underground Railroad”
The world feels so cold sometimes– not ice-cold–more like half-done microwaved ravioli cold. Those on the edges are warmed by privilege, but for the middle, well, they aren’t.
‘God bless America,’ they tell me, God bless a native burial ground that we converted into fast-food and liquor stores; God bless the land we so proudly claimed and ruined in one go.
‘In God we trust,’ they tell me. Do I really trust the God who allowed countless black men to die without a cause; who based immortality on an apple?
Even if I don’t, I hear it every morning at school; we are one nation under God, indivisible, aren’t we? It’s laughable in a country so divided that you’re either a gun-loving loon or an anarchist.
We’re just killing ourselves, our children, our brothers, but there’s no one to trust. Even the cops are joining in on the deranged killings America is known for. And they’ll keep doing it until one day, they’re the ones who can’t breathe.
Basic human rights have become nothing more than politics. The right to stay alive is not a right but a cost. You might get shot by a cop and receive nothing but a name added to a list of the dead for justice.
Life cannot be valued by money or summed up to one mistake. Death is not coincidence; greed is not accidental, and if you think it is, I’ll send you my thoughts and prayers; you know, how they do to the victims of mass shootings.
This is the truth of America; painful, heart-aching, endless-death-everywhere-America. And you may love it here–if so, congratulations. You are on the outer edge of the microwaved ravioli of America.
Meanwhile, the people who are shot in school, shot by police, killed for their race, dying in hospitals, stuck at the border camps, sentenced despite innocence; they are in the middle.
If you put your country in a broken microwave, how do you expect it to prosper? How do you expect everyone to take pride in their land? To want to say that pledge?
Until you care for the whole, this land will be cold, and you will either accept it or fight for the spread of wealth, the spread of justice, of rights, of warmth
to everyone. Not just the upper class, not just the outer edge of the plate. It’s cold in the middle. Would you like to join the fight?
Or will you wither away, watching this country fall apart, going down in history as nothing more than a spectator who turned a blind eye? The choice is yours; make the most of it.
