Yes, You Matter*<\/p>\n
In The United States of America,\u00a0 the average suburban white citizen has been fed this idea that every citizen matters, and the country runs smoothly.\u00a0\u00a0 Cracks at the picturesque facade of the hardworking family living the ‘American Dream™’ have been met with vicious and categoric denials for ages. Regrettably, we are at a point in history wherein denying the problem has more to say about the denier than the problem itself.\u00a0\u00a0 The issues are too obvious,\u00a0 they’ve been ongoing for too long, and they run too deep to be brushed off as a fringe issue.<\/p>\n
‘Good Christians™’ before turned a blind eye when one out of five children went hungry every night in the wealthiest country in the world,\u00a0 those were acceptable numbers.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 That same folk was OK with us having a quarter of the global incarcerated, but they didn’t want it in their backyard.\u00a0 In fact, ‘Not In My Backyard, or NIMBY’ runs rampant across the pursuit of the American Dream.\u00a0 \u00a0When children weren’t just hungry, but were being shot?\u00a0 Gun sales increased.\u00a0 When children weren’t just hungry and being killed, but thrown into for-profit cages and forcibly ripped from their parents?\u00a0 They were looked upon as criminals who deserved such treatment.<\/p>\n
Children now are being forced back into schools despite a loud chorus of voices saying it is not safe to do so, and they’re starting to die as a result.\u00a0 It is worth repeating; the authoritarians are forcing children to die yet again.\u00a0 School boards are voting unanimously to do distance learning, but governors need to appease the tyrant in charge and are overruling the people who know what they’re doing. \u00a0In some red-state areas, they’ve made it a felony to protest, and felonies mean you lose your right to vote.\u00a0 If you go on strike, you lose your license and your pension.\u00a0 Hey, you matter*.<\/p>\n
When COVID-19 response plans are scrapped because they will hurt blue states more,\u00a0 you matter*.\u00a0\u00a0 When the post office is dismantled because it will contribute to voting difficulties, but also medicine delivery, financial and business burdens, etc., you matter*.\u00a0\u00a0 When you try to get in touch with your congressional figure, but they’re too busy dealing with big money interests, you matter*.\u00a0 When the police kill someone by pinning them on a burning hot Phoenix sidewalk for several minutes or suffocate them by pinning them on a Minnesota sidewalk for several minutes, you matter*. \u00a0\u00a0When your vote is designed to count less than someone else’s, and people scream at you how good the system is, you matter*.<\/p>\n
You matter* when your medical bills alter the direction of your life, at the hands of a for-profit insurance industry that exists to keep you as a repeat customer, not to cure you.\u00a0 However,\u00a0 you do matter to people like me who understand the American Dream died a long time ago, and it may have just been an illusion all along, a propaganda tool to keep the minorities in their place.\u00a0 President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”<\/p>\n
As time went on, the high-and-mighty looked down upon everyone, not just people of color.\u00a0 If you weren’t a ‘Good Christian™,’ you were a second-class citizen.\u00a0 \u00a0If you were LGBT,\u00a0 if you listened to different music,\u00a0 if you were a Liberal, any excuse people could find to make you conform and test your tribal loyalties to their ideas of reactionary red, white, and blue.\u00a0 Now,\u00a0 our understanding of how varied we are as people have put this insular group in panic.\u00a0 They openly advocate for a white-supremacist Christian theocracy, publicly opposing all progress we’ve been making in the last century.<\/p>\n
We have a white-supremacist in the oval office and an unrepresentative Senate, ensuring that large swaths of us don’t matter.\u00a0 We aren’t even paid token lip service.\u00a0\u00a0 Whether it be for our children,\u00a0 the integrity of the system itself,\u00a0 deep-seated hatred at systemic injustice, \u00a0or overdue enlightenment on the realities of America that many of us learned long ago (welcome to reality, we’re working to make it better).\u00a0\u00a0 You have a choice.\u00a0 You can be on an authoritarian side of history wherein you don’t matter unless you’re a tiny percentage of people with the money and the lack of morals to continue the looting and pillaging.\u00a0 However,\u00a0 you can help to create a place where we don’t just matter to those we know personally but overall,\u00a0 where we have worth because we exist.\u00a0 A place where children can have a future that doesn’t involve guns and cages, but instead, food safety, education, and healthcare. \u00a0\u00a0A future where the content of our character is the critical component in calibrating our course,\u00a0 not some genetic features like sex organs or skin color.<\/p>\n
~Monk Anchorwind<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yes, You Matter* In The United States of America,\u00a0 the average suburban white citizen has been fed this idea that every citizen matters, and the country runs smoothly.\u00a0\u00a0 Cracks at the picturesque facade of the hardworking family living the ‘American Dream™’ have been met with vicious and categoric denials for ages. Regrettably, we are at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[338],"tags":[291],"class_list":["post-27787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-considered-thoughts","tag-291"],"yoast_head":"\n