America the Broken

I am so incredibly heartbroken and disgusted by what has happened in the last few days. Brutal, unapologetic rapists get a 3 month prison sentence, a young rising singer loved by everyone who knew her murdered in a senseless act of violence, and then I wake up this morning to learn about the horror what went down in Orlando.

And I don’t have words. Certainly not civil ones.

All year, we’ve been hearing “Make America Great Again!!” along with “It’s ______’s fault.” The immigrants, the gays, the Muslims…etc etc etc. Things aren’t the way they used to be, and we are freakin’ uncomfortable with that.

But what happened to the still small voice of love in our hearts, against which everything is weighed and compared, which helps guide our responses and actions? Are we listening to the small, scared voice of our comfort zones instead?

I do not feel safe in my country and that has not always been the case, simply because I did not used to know what horrors awaited me in the real world. The kind of Great America that too many of us are hoping for does not exist, and it will not be solved by any one presidential candidate. Pining after such an illusion is like obsessing over the golden days of childhood—the blissful ignorance of privilege we simply cannot afford to entertain anymore. People are suffering, people are dying. What kind of modern, development-oriented society are we that allows this? Since the dawn of forever, the marginalized have been silenced, and now that they have fought and sacrificed and paid very dearly for the most basic of introductory footholds to make their voices heard, how dare we not listen. How dare we push them away and whine for the good ol’ days so we can ignore reality and sit in our cozy privilege and look after only ourselves and our posh, 2-dimensional ideas? 

The more I see of our downward spiral and notice the patterns in our history, the more I think perhaps America has never been “great.” We have used our power and wealth to meddle and abuse for as long as we’ve had the means. We are proud to be a melting pot, but at the same time, we stand on the bodies of the peoples we exploited to make our country what it is and continue to exploit them. We have sanitized and domesticated and commercialized ourselves and our ideas to a point that, quite frankly, no longer looks human to me, and our modern worshipping of firearms and status quo has led to the caustic, systemic plague of violence and hate exploding all around us.

And amidst all this horror and pain, how dare we think self-preservation is worth the monstrosities we are permitting?

Love is the greatest weapon against hate. It is a compass, a counterbalance. But faith without action is dead. Making this life count requires something of us, and if we want to do good in this world, it will not be from the tiny boxes we’ve decided are big enough.

The American Dream is over. It’s time to wake up.

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A/N: I’ve kept my wrath to myself the last few months. I may just be one young, angry voice. But something needs to change, and I will add mine to the call.