Sisters and brothers-- we are immovably, unshakably intricately interlocked.

A history has breathed you into life.

The stories of what came before are embedded into every breath, every whisper, every interaction, every physical object, every social construction, every system of power, every idea or thought or notion— every scrap of what is viewed as “normal” in our present, infinitely small, marvelously insignificant lifespan on planet Earth.

Everything, everything, around you — couches, desks, plastic, books, your clothes, race, Christianity, liberal/conservative ideologies, the government, fashion, journalism — was created by your fellow apes who were and are no better or more important than you.

The enormous number of human beings making the billions of individual decisions that spin the web of our now-towering reality, are just that— human. Fallible, problematic creatures highly subject to the pull of their own self-interest, as evolution and survival has long demanded.

This way of life was fabricated by people who instituted systemic poverty, slavery, imprisonment, forced servitude, starvation, sexism, racism— so they could profit.

It holds true today that the oppression of other human beings — by private prison companies, the health care industry, low-wage corporations, farm worker employers, etc. — is enormously lucrative.

In this cruel, exploitative world— we must question everything.

And, with a slight challenge, with a faint push of logic— the shroud collapses, and the egregious truth is revealed.

In America, human beings endure poverty​ so deep “many people don’t believe [it] exists here.” Children go hungry. Brown and Black Americans live crippled by racial prejudice and die young. Native Americans are stricken by poverty and murdered by police. Uneducated White Americans are getting sicker and killing themselves through suicide and drug addiction. Women are raped, trafficked, abused, and discriminated against. The public school system is racist, unequal, and unfairly funded. We bury more people because of gun violence than any other developed nation in the world. Our labor force is abused and underpaid. Our people are sicker than those of any other wealthy country, and we live underneath a prison system that brutalizes people, especially those who are Hispanic, Native, Black, and Brown, a system locking Americans behind bars at a rate seen nowhere else on this Earth.

The story here is one of oppression.

Continent to continent, coast to coast, from blasted mountain to dwindling forest, from polluted sea to growing desert, human beings hurt one another. We have committed atrocity upon atrocity, for tens of thousands of years (or perhaps several hundred thousand), against the living beings around us, because we have seen atrocities and had atrocities done unto us, and because we are too-often driven by greed and desire for power.

America is no different.

And the proletariat struggle to challenge this long line of tyranny has yet to grip the populace because we are taught to obey, not to question, and because we are lied to.

In America’s public schools, children are made to sit down and listen to the teacher, obey, act nicely, raise their hand, and respect adults. They are not taught to critically analyze in fair, equal schools, but filled with facts as if they are empty vessels in racist, unequally funded schools.

And, as adults, our people are bombarded with false information, foiled into electing politicians who are paid by corporations, who will enact friendly-to-the-rich laws, who will never work to unravel and reform this corrupt system.

As The New York Times reports,

There is little question that the enormous sums flowing into candidates’ campaign coffers undermine democracy, breed cynicism and shape policy to the preferences of powerful donors. Unbridled campaign contributions invite nightmare situations in which those at the pinnacle of society purchase the power needed to preserve the yawning inequities of the status quo.

We have no control over what our government does. The basis of democracy, 1 vote for 1 person, is nowhere to be found in the United States. Our freedom is a sham.

Beholden to corporate interests, our politicians do not care what we think.

From Cambridge University Press,

...Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

Our government employees neither work for us nor represent us. And while we are confused by their falsehoods, they rob us even further of a voice, of any control over our lives.

From The Nation,

The attack on voting rights has spread to virtually every state in the country. From 2011 to 2015, 395 new voting restrictions have been introduced in forty-nine states (Idaho is the lone exception). Half the states in the country have adopted measures making it harder to vote.

We are living on this tiny little spinning rock, orbiting a massive galaxy, of which there are hundreds of billions— living as unhappily, as unequally, and as miserably as we possibly can.

Human beings started at the beginning of this bizarre, head-long crash of an existence with some promise of intelligence, but we have wielded that immense power to conquer and accumulate wealth.

We could have a marvelous time here.

We could organize the land beautifully for all its people, for all its creatures.

We do not have to have this oligarchic state. We could have a country of health care, critical thinking education, living wages, prison that provides the education that should have been provided at birth, and does not punish poor people for deigning to survive.

We could have a vibrant economy powered by knowledgeable and skilled citizens, filled with creativity and innovation.

Just think of the geniuses born into poverty here, blocked from unlocking their brilliance because of how much money their parents have. Think of the great minds we have lost, the wondrous scientists, inventors, mathematicians, leaders, musicians, magicians, and artists who could have contributed to our society, could have pushed humanity above and beyond, but for our wasteful, expensive, and unjust society of prison, no education, low-wage jobs, and lack of opportunity.

To have a country so wonderful, so prosperous, so full of potential— we must only unite. We must only cast aside hatred, fear, prejudice— of Black/White, Muslim/Christian, conservative/liberal, men/women— and come together.

We must begin to follow the money, and realize we are all in the same group getting screwed by the handful of people stacking up piles of green, ludicrous amounts of money impossible to spend in fifteen lifetimes.

Instead, we continue on, trudging through this thousand-years-old slog of oppression, blind to the depths of the inequalities and injustices that bleed from America’s soil.

We must awaken; we must get angry; we must get active.

Stand up, my fellow Americans, unite with your human beings, your sisters, your brothers, and WIN this long-waged war against injustice, fight the power structure that has long controlled the masses, once and for all destroy the insidious form oppression has taken as the centuries pass—

Shut this government down as Congress does in a moment, force our employees to report to us, morph this country into the land of truth and equality that is waiting, trembling, hanging at the tips of our fingers, longing to be taken and made reality.

Pour your energy, minds, hearts, and souls into this fight, the most vital battle any of us will ever wage, and save this lurching, reeling humanity.

We are teetering, we are tottering, quaking on the brink.

You, me, him, and her— every last human living in this country, not free because we are all not free, bound because chains go unbroken, enslaved because our fellow humans suffer, each one of us, forever linked, inexorably interlocked.

The Revolution is long, stretching millennia, not confined to one human, but slow moving and heavily lumbering across the centuries of the human experience.

Will you be a warrior in this noble battle?

Will you end the endless fight for humanity’s soul?

Will the citizens vote en masse, the elite’s greatest fear?