From the beginning, the US has been built to exploit resources and people to prop up it’s own existence

as a settler-colonial state. The United States cannot exist without this, especially when those who actually
hold power within these borders will do everything they can to preserve the status quo. Throughout
history we have seen what the US ruling class has been willing to do to preserve their interests abroad, in
Asia, in Latin America, or in Africa. How many have died from guns with the marking-”Made in USA”,
how many will die in the future under the pretense of defending the “American Dream”? To this day the
people of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia suffer from the aftermath of the largest bombing campaigns in
US history. Massive sections of rainforest and farmland were burned to the ground or killed by chemical
weapons made by the companies who control our food.

Growing up, we’re always told how great we have it here in the US, but where does this come from, do
we have what we have because of “American work ethic” or because of the plundering of the rest of the
world, and those in our own borders to provide some sort of great system that most people here don’t
even experience. Think, what is the cost of your computer, the food you eat, your phone, your car? Do
they truly come from some sort of hard work? Or do they come from child slavery in mines in Africa?
Does most food in the US come from the idyllic family farm on a milk carton, or an industry where the
workers have over a three times higher suicide rate than the rest of the US?

So the question becomes, how do we balance our needs with the exploitation that currently fulfills them?
I believe that the only way to accomplish this is with a clean slate, the United States in its current form is
a dying beast that has proven time and time again that it is not on the right side of history. I admit that I
do not know how we will do this, but the status quo needs to go. The voices of those who suffer the
downsides of our overproduction, those whose sacred lands we occupy, and those who truly do engage in
the production of material wealth that this country relies on need to be heard. Today, the Indigenous
workers of the gas industry in the Southwest suffer the brunt of both working and living on the land, one
anonymous workersaying “But the thing that frustrates me out there is that they don’t hear us… We’ve
got a voice, but they don’t hear us, they just push us to the side”.

The writer Terry Tempest Williams pointed out in her essay “The Pall of Our Unrest” that we have
nowhere to turn, and we are running out of time to make the necessary change in our treatment of the
environment, and with this knowledge I leave off with a question, that everyone here will have to answer
at some point, we are left with two paths in this country, change for the better, or maintain the status quo,
so I ask, Which side are you on?