When I was small, I believed in Fairy Tales. I was wrong, and I’m ashamed I was so naive. I believed that America was something special, despite its problems. My eyes are wide open now.
I wonder what the Indians thought when their land was stolen. I bet they were sad to lose their home, but I bet they couldn't imagine that in a few hundred years it would be ruined, the forests gone, the buffalo massacred, the whole damn country stolen and stripped for parts to make the global elite richer.
I wonder how that would have felt. Probably a lot worse.
I wonder what it feels like to be one of the powerful. Weak in body, corrupt in mind and spirit, but still able to assert dominance over regular folks because of some made up numbers they claim mean something. And those numbers, those dollars, do mean something.
But only because we allow it.
If we could bring back the displaced indigenous people, I wonder what they would do. Before their spirit and traditions were broken, they were as powerful as the sun.
I wonder if they could even imagine that the white men, who came first in friendship (or the illusion of it), would slaughter them without conscience and say that is what their God wanted. I wonder if they could even imagine a God who would tell his people to act this way against other people. To steal their land, rape their women, and put them in schools where they have to relearn humanity, a foreign version of it with less heart and accountability.
There was tribal warfare before the Europeans, sure, but no one was strip mining the hills so we would all have to fish in polluted streams. They weren't bent on genocide. They respected the land, and it repaid the respect.
The ones who fought back? They are buried in secret graveyards all over this country, but by all means, let’s talk about trans people and drag queens, because that’s what really matters.