Our country is moving backwards in trying to establish new ideals. The founding fathers of the United States of America based this country on religious freedom, freedom from oppression, and the basic separation of church and state. We are now doing everything in our power to make sure that the US is a Christian police state, teaching Creationism in public schools, and allowing the military to legally detain American citizens indefinitely with no proof of doing anything wrong.
Texas recently passed a law that Creationism be taught alongside evolution in schools. One is religious, the other is science. As Texas is one of the largest order-ers of textbooks in the country, textbook manufacturers likely won’t have multiple versions of the same edition of books, and your child in Tennessee or Iowa may soon be learning Creationism in public school as well--regardless of your religious beliefs or non-beliefs, or your state’s current curriculum. I don't actually care what your religion is, but I don't want whatever you believe to be shoved down my theoretical child's throat.
I have long considered running for political office. Not because I care about politics, but because I care about people and the state of our country,and what we are becoming. But then I get seized by the question...would I genuinely be able to make a difference? Or would my hands be tied by the office I hold, by the laws I’d be swearing to uphold, and by the people whom I would be governing? How many of our nation’s current politicians started out as starry-eyed young people believing they could truly make a difference?
Why is it that a young woman, not particularly politically-inclined, no smarter or more dumb than any other average 25-year-old with a college education from the US public school system can see so clearly the things that should be most important in our country today?
Unemployment is sky-high, poverty levels are rising, people all over the country are deep in debt, losing their homes, and what is being done about it?
We are what will be studied in history books for generations.
How will we be remembered in history? As the highest unemployment rates since the Great Depression? As the ones who destroyed our nation’s economy fighting wars many of Americans didn’t want or agree with, in countries we shouldn’t have been in, staying long after those countries have asked us to leave? As the generation pushing back women’s rights, less than a century after we finally allowed them the legal right to vote for our nation’s leaders? Pushing back on human rights, so slow to recognize that gay or straight, all human beings deserve equality. As an increasingly intolerant nation, blaming whole races and ethnicities for the atrocities of a few zealots? Perhaps as the generation that allowed religion back into schools, but only the religion that legislators agreed was appropriate to teach?
Why do people even talk about abortion anymore? As of now, it is still legal, LET IT GO. Until Roe v. Wade is overturned, it’s a waste of time to be discussing it every time someone needs an incendiary or conservative platform. If you’re going to start putting conditions on what women can do with their bodies medically, then I demand that restrictions be placed on men wanting Viagra, Cialis, and vasectomies. These are things that men do, and no one in legislation is trying to require a prostate exam before getting them, or that insurance companies shouldn’t cover it, and it should be brought up as a perfectly parallel argument to the one currently going on in Virginia right now.
I don’t know about you, but I will NOT be remembered as someone who oppresses an entire gender, who hates people based on nothing more than what they look like or where they are from, or someone who forgot that the United State of America is supposed to be based on freedom. Freedom to love, believe, and become anyone and anything.
I leave you with the words our nation uses to welcome everyone who comes into this country.
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
-the Statue of Liberty
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