Persuasion

A provocative attention grabber? Okay. The US needs to be burned to the ground.

I am taking a speech class and I needed to write a persuasive speech. But I couldn't come up with a topic. I struggled for two weeks to write even one word.

And then, late Thursday evening, exhausted and frustrated with so many things, I sat down and looked at the outline.

"Write a provocative first sentence as an attention grabber."

A provocative attention grabber? Okay. The US needs to be burned to the ground.

From there the words just flew from my fingertips and onto the page. I think I finished it in less than 2 hours. Editing and all. Because I'm angry. Because I'm sad. Because I want us all to be free and I believe we can make it happen. So here it is:

A persuasive essay, by Malialani

The US needs to be burned to the ground. And honestly? I’m tired of pretending otherwise.

An experiment created by wealthy white men to consolidate and maintain power, the United States has been a smashing success according to their standards. But we in the 21st century no longer put lead in paint nor do we, the majority, desire to pander to racist misogynistic superiority complexes. The United States spends more on maintaining centralized power for a select few old white men through military and policing than it does on health care, education, and housing combined. And it must be stopped.

I’m Malialani Dullanty, an Indigenous woman who has been obsessed with politics since middle school. To the point where I figured out I could run for president the year I turned 35 and wanted to be the youngest, first female, and first indigenous president ever. Ironically, that year is this year.

The Founding Fathers, so endearingly referenced by many of our politicians, were a handful of wealthy pasty men squatting on stolen land who did not desire freedom, but power. 

Their considerations were not for the Indigenous peoples already living on the lands they claimed for their own, nor the enslaved Africans doing all the labor that allowed them to drink and argue over their rights, not even for their wives at home with their children, no. The Declaration of Independence, The Bill of Rights, and Constitution were to only apply to white landowning men.

The United States has shifted to allow Native peoples their land - and by their land, I mean reservations held tentatively by blood quantum rules and treaties that are regularly violated for the purposes of obtaining minerals, oil, timber, and other resources that desecrate the sacred and defy written law. It has also outlawed slavery - at least, on plantations, as prison slave labor is very real and disproportionately affects Black and brown people specifically because slave catchers became police and Black and brown people were relegated to slums and neighborhoods that were more heavily policed in order to maintain a sense of safety for the white families who felt threatened by those of a different race. And women now have all the same rights as men - on paper, however the wage gap exists and women are often specifically targeted by men in power to manipulate and control through the withholding of opportunities if they do not comply to a man’s every whim and even if they do submit to this time honored tradition, violence is frequently used against them by these men to “keep them in line” and their stories are rarely believed.

Power continues to be the only desire of those who reach the pinnacle of US Government, regardless of the race or gender of an individual who has assimilated to white male culture in order to succeed. We can see this through the US’s continued military occupation of over 80 countries, targeted bombing of the middle east in order to maintain control of oil, and regular installation of US sympathetic dictators in countries that might dare to lean toward the left throughout the last two decades over the course of four different presidents.

But the dark success of the Founding Fathers’ does not need to define us now in the 21st century.

With climate change no longer only pressuring countries through heat waves, but with more and more regular “unprecedented” natural catastrophes, we see a return to Indigenous wisdoms of caring for the land. The deforested and salinated Midwest continues to set the pace for the climate change panic, with few tribes left to curb the damage due to the US govt’s push of Indigenous people across the country in the Trail of Tears. However, as Indigenous people take back their rights through force, protest, academia, and law, we can see the clear benefit of utilizing traditional methods to care for the land with controlled burning, reforestation, controlled fishing and hunting for sustenance rather than sport, and even indigenous horticulture methods which we’ve come to call “permaculture”.

These returns to indigenous values help us see that representation is not enough. The system must be overturned. The physicality of Indigenous, Black, and brown bodies participating in toxic government projects is ultimately just a method of pacifying the masses rather than an enactment of true change. Despite having had its first Black president in 2008, the United States found itself still enacting the same colonial war tactics, rising numbers of Black deaths at the hands of police, and continued unethical extraction of resources from periphery countries. The Black Panthers are an example of a group who has always known we cannot rely on the system that oppresses us to grant us freedom. With their free breakfasts and educational opportunities, they strengthened communities by working outside of governmental, nongovernmental, and nonprofit entities.

Power to the people. This is the only way forward. We don’t need representation in a system meant to withhold power from us, we need to reclaim our power by working outside of it. Reaching for methods and methodologies that served our ancestors who came before us and will serve our ancestors who come after us while utilizing technology and resources ethically instead of extractively is how we must meet the future in order for there to be a future.

And with the current state of the world, the time to act is now. As money and resources are thrown into military and policing rather than care, we must recognize our collective power to unite against the system that has actively harmed us since 1776 and before, and create a new one.

One that values the health of its people. One that prioritizes holistic and preventative care rather than pharmaceutical profits. One that does not prescribe a one-size-fits-all mentality to peoples’ physical selves nor to their mental selves or spiritual selves. In a world where people die while using gofundme’s to raise enough money for life saving medications, mothers are forced back to work before their babies can lift their heads, and medical debt is handed down generation to generation, we can and must do better.

A system that values education, not regurgitation. That sees and treats students as individuals with identifiable talents and abilities that are diverse and important. Education that allows them to pursue knowledge, not grades. That does not place young people in mountains of debt in order to enter a job field littered with mines of positions that don’t pay a living wage and believe work should be a minimum of 45 hours a week.

We must create a place where people are seen as having value, not for what they offer to a system of oppression offering a carrot of the American Dream where when you reach it, you simply become the oppressor. With more than enough houses in the United States to provide comfort and shelter to everyone, the US instead chooses to strip individuals of their dignity by not only refusing to provide housing, but to additionally making it illegal to be unhoused. Cities install disgusting anti-homeless architecture to ensure the upper class need not be bothered by people less fortunate than themselves. Selling the idea of pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps, making it an issue of personal sin rather than the obvious exposure of systemic rot it is that there are basic rights being withheld based on your ability to slave within that system.

We weren’t meant to live like this. Of course we weren’t. We were told to. By a handful of men who enjoyed drinking in taverns and philosophizing about conceptual freedom for a select few and dreamed of power, not liberty.

And their dream became a reality. A nightmare we are forced to live in day in and day out, but the founding fathers are dead. And to continue to pander to their racist misogynistic superiority complexes seems gross, if not a display of the absolute corruption of our souls. We the people hold the power and ability within us to create a new dream. A new experiment through which we can reshape the world in which we live, the world in which our children and grandchildren will live. In the ashes of the empire, with blueprints from our ancestors and solidarity of our brothers and sisters, our imaginations are the limit to pursue something different, something better, together.

So? Let’s light the match.