The sun will rise again.
The sun rose today. It’ll rise again tomorrow. It’ll keep doing that throughout our lifetimes, but we all know it won’t rise forever. In something like 17 billion years, that star will fade and die out and the solar system as we know it will go with it. Nothing lasts forever. That’s what we tell ourselves when things are bad. It’s what we forget when things are good.
This isn’t an easy conversation to have. The ones that matter most never are. But it needs to be said, if only for the sake of someone having said it: America is sick.
We want and have to believe that it won’t always be this way. That this country will become healthy and good like we know in our hearts it can be. But before we can get to that point, we must admit that it is not healthy. It is not good. America carries in its chest a rattling cough that no one wants to acknowledge. That is, until it coughs up a fragmented result of our disillusionment and reveals in it the horrifying depths of this country’s sickness. But there is too much at stake for those at the top to allow our awareness to last for long. Thoughts and prayers for those suffering, thoughts and prayers that you forget why they suffer.
In pursuit of maintaining an illusion, people have been sent to war. They have died in war, memorialized as heroes for their efforts and for helping maintain the illusion. People have been plunged and restrained in poverty. People have lost their homes, their loved ones, their own lives as a result of the sick undercurrent that spans across every aspect of this country.
Today will not be the day that America realizes gun violence can be stopped, and does something about it. It will not be the day that America realizes our working class is abusively overworked, and does something about it. It will not be the day that America realizes that systemic racism is a foundation on which this country was built and is still used today to justify the continued oppression of Americans, and does something about it. But nothing lasts forever.
Maybe someday, if enough people shout, with enough variety of style, for a long enough time, the message will sink in: America is sick. The American Dream is a lie. Let’s stop lying to ourselves and start treating this sickness. But for a country that so desperately requires the curtain not be pulled back in order to maintain the delicate balance of enormous inequality, that is a difficult and at times dangerous demand.
Some time ago, I stumbled across the curtain and peeled it back by just an inch. I didn’t know at the time exactly which curtain I was pulling at. But the resultant week-long witch hunt, articles and books, phone calls to my family members, all intent on deriding me for daring to tug made it clear. I pulled at the one curtain we’re not supposed to acknowledge even exists. The one we’re just expected to believe, no matter what else we believe alongside it. It’s a bloody, dusty old thing that ought to be thrown out already. But many aren’t ready to admit it. They still lean into the idea of bootstraps — which you’re a fool to believe is at all synonymous with actual hard work — and the idea that a flag is more deserving of your support than justice for your fellow Americans, or that basic necessities like clean water are a “privilege.” It’s a curtain that we have used for centuries to cover up genocide, slavery, massive wealth inequality, and systemic sexism. And now we’re using it to hide our almost total inability to get our leaders to do what’s right.
Say it with me: The American Dream is a lie. Everything that feeds it is a lie. And our refusal to believe that fact is what those at the top rely on to justify robbing us all blind. They’re stealing our lives, our livelihoods, our access to quality healthcare, education, and even voting rights. And they will keep taking until we are convulsing and shuddering from the depravity. This was the case before 2016, just perhaps not quite so obvious, and will be the case after Trump.
But nothing lasts forever. The sun will rise again. Tell yourself whatever you need to move past whatever shock and anger and confusion you’re choking on. You don’t need to know all the details to know that violence in America has become as American as the flag itself, and as diverse and all-inclusive as America once told itself it was. And that’s a threat worth fighting against every single day.
