I am now part of the Post-Roe generation. I am 21, I have a uterus, and I am tired. I am tired of waking up to the news every other week about a mass shooting, a law infringing upon U.S. citizens' safety, or legislation allowing discrimination, hate, and resentment to grow. I am ashamed to be an American, where after 30 years and 132 mass shootings, Congress barely managed to pass a weak bipartisan measure towards gun control. I am ashamed to be an American where I have been stripped of the constitutional right to choose an elective medical procedure at will, losing my bodily autonomy to the Supreme Court which values private gun ownership over women’s rights. I am tired of the rampant hatred cutting into our schools, where children are shielded from ‘harmful’ representation of people other than themselves, and the horrible history of slavery that has built this country.
If I have children, I have decided I do not wish to have them here. I would want to raise them in a country that is not controlled by corporations puppeteers, where the healthcare system does not profit from their sickness, in a country that does not prioritize mass incarceration in privatized for-profit prisons over rehabilitation. America is run for money. We are the ‘Land Of The Free” until we look down and see that we are stuck in the massive cogs of the bigger machines, and we will be ground to bits underneath the weight of greed. The food we eat, the places we live, the cities and the countryside, and the schools and prisons, every aspect of life in America cannot remain untouched by the corruption of the people in power over us. The illusion of power as citizens is just that, an illusion. We thrive on individualism fed to us by our school curriculums, but when we need to come together to make a change in our government, roughly fifty of the country chooses not to vote.
The entire concept of our governmental structure allows for us to step back, take a load off, and worry about our own little problems. The corporation giants that really lead our country will continue to feed the pockets of our legislators and Presidents in legal bribery, and we will continue to believe the futile hope that campaign promises actually mean promises. Our country is built off of idealism, ‘Every person for themselves’, ‘One man against them all’, and our lack of community and continuity throughout the states will destroy us. We are not a society, we live in an illusion of community and a country that can come together as one. We never will, and are incapable of change without unity. That is why, I would never raise my children in this country.