America Has (Always) Had a Problem

With the current political and social climate of the world right now, some could argue that the United States has lost its title of being ‘the greatest country in the world’ and could be considered the black sheep of countries in the world right now. Across the nation right now, families are being torn apart, innocent civilians are being murdered in broad daylight and detained by I.C.E; many have even been comparing the U.S to Nazi Germany. However, according to James Whitman, it's been proven that Hitler and the Nuremberg Laws were inspired by America’s Jim Crow. Some may believe that this further proves that America has never been ‘great’ and rather has always been a corrupt country. That America has continuously exploited people who helped build this country. It's known that Christopher Columbus accidentally 'discovered’ what is now the United States; before Columbus’s unintentional discovery, Indigenous people had been living in America hundreds of years before it was even ‘founded’. As a result of Columbus’s ‘discovery’, colonization came around and millions of Indigenous people were forced off their land, enslaved and murdered. This same cycle repeated for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and kept this cycle going for the enslavement of Africans in the U.S. (which lasted for hundreds of years and many practices are still in practice today). With Donald Trump’s slogan of ‘Making America Great Again’, it can’t be helped but question what he really means. Does he mean to better improve America’s economy and set better laws that’ll benefit the country and its people as a whole? Or does he mean to revert the country to what it has always been and further exploit the actual Americans of this country. To continue to be complicit in the murder of innocent lives all while profiting off it? That answer can be spoken for based on the actions we see versus what he says. Now as we witness the horrible tragedies happening across the nation, many will ask themselves ‘I can’t believe this is happening’ or ‘this isn’t the America I know’. We must remember that some have known America to have always been this way, while others have not. Those now finally seeing the country to what many may know and believe it to be, may say that they just finally got caught. In response, people have become fed up with staying silent.

Image Courtesy: Ted Eytan