Yes, You Matter*
In The United States of America, the average suburban white citizen has been fed this idea that every citizen matters, and the country runs smoothly. 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. The issues are too obvious, they’ve been ongoing for too long, and they run too deep to be brushed off as a fringe issue.
‘Good Christians™’ before turned a blind eye when one out of five children went hungry every night in the wealthiest country in the world, those were acceptable numbers. That same folk was OK with us having a quarter of the global incarcerated, but they didn’t want it in their backyard. In fact, ‘Not In My Backyard, or NIMBY’ runs rampant across the pursuit of the American Dream. When children weren’t just hungry, but were being shot? Gun sales increased. When children weren’t just hungry and being killed, but thrown into for-profit cages and forcibly ripped from their parents? They were looked upon as criminals who deserved such treatment.
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. It is worth repeating; the authoritarians are forcing children to die yet again. 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. In some red-state areas, they’ve made it a felony to protest, and felonies mean you lose your right to vote. If you go on strike, you lose your license and your pension. Hey, you matter*.
When COVID-19 response plans are scrapped because they will hurt blue states more, you matter*. When the post office is dismantled because it will contribute to voting difficulties, but also medicine delivery, financial and business burdens, etc., you matter*. When you try to get in touch with your congressional figure, but they’re too busy dealing with big money interests, you matter*. 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*. When your vote is designed to count less than someone else’s, and people scream at you how good the system is, you matter*.
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. However, 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. 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.”
As time went on, the high-and-mighty looked down upon everyone, not just people of color. If you weren’t a ‘Good Christian™,’ you were a second-class citizen. If you were LGBT, if you listened to different music, 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. Now, our understanding of how varied we are as people have put this insular group in panic. They openly advocate for a white-supremacist Christian theocracy, publicly opposing all progress we’ve been making in the last century.
We have a white-supremacist in the oval office and an unrepresentative Senate, ensuring that large swaths of us don’t matter. We aren’t even paid token lip service. Whether it be for our children, the integrity of the system itself, deep-seated hatred at systemic injustice, or overdue enlightenment on the realities of America that many of us learned long ago (welcome to reality, we’re working to make it better). You have a choice. 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. However, you can help to create a place where we don’t just matter to those we know personally but overall, where we have worth because we exist. A place where children can have a future that doesn’t involve guns and cages, but instead, food safety, education, and healthcare. A future where the content of our character is the critical component in calibrating our course, not some genetic features like sex organs or skin color.
~Monk Anchorwind