As many of us watch and observe the US landscape changing, questions surely arise within each of us who feel like a deer in the headlights.
Is what we see challenging us today unspoken and unhealed pain, wrapped in fear, and delivered as indifference or hate?
To those who blindly rally behind power seekers,
To those who cheer as freedoms fall,
To those who believe domination is strength.
I question:
Why are we so angry?
What happened to us?
What hurt us so deeply that we now find comfort in cruelty, in control, in tearing down what others have built using destruction without thought or plan.
What part of life made us believe that punishment is leadership and that power is more valuable than truth?
Was it fear? Was it abandonment? Was it betrayal by a system that should protect us, the citizens of this country. All citizens of this country, regardless of ideology?
I see and hear the rage, and it is loud. But behind rage, there is always pain.
And rather than face that pain, we’ve clung to the voices that give us someone to blame – choosing scapegoats over solutions, division over dialogue, obedience over thought.
I ask, not as an enemy, but as a fellow citizen:
Will we help destroy a nation that belongs to our children when evidence points to tyranny versus leadership?
Can tyranny save a country? What or who will it save it from? From books? From teachers? From thinkers? From immigrants who dream of the very freedom being traded away? We wouldn’t be here if our ancestors weren’t brave enough to take the risk of moving into the unknown.
Do we not honor our ancestors?
Will this allegiance to power and masking fear be used to completely silence dissent, erase history, and remove the rights we will one day wish we had back?
We weren’t born this way. No child enters the world hating. Hate, or indifference, is learned.
This is not about shaming anyone.
I want to remind citizens of this country that it’s not too late to make a different choice.
To ask the hard questions. To peel back the layers of propaganda and see our reflection without the armor of anger and fear.
We do not have to be part of the machine that erodes democracy brick by brick.
We do not have to trade our voice for a flag or our minds for a chant preaching hate and indifference.
Manipulation is not a conspiracy theory, but a documented tactic.
Tested.
Refined.
Used.
Studied by those who have studied human behavior. Not to heal it, to control it.
Using fear.
Using data.
Using strategy.
Our nation is wounded. But it is not beyond repair. We can be part of the healing, if we are willing to ask:
Moving ego aside, “Does this feel good in my soul right now?”
From a concerned citizen, dog mom, educator, and believer in the power of humanity to rise, not fall.