As someone who grew up heavily impoverished as a disabled minority in the United States, this has been the America I've always known. It's been the America that all my friends have always known.
The one that disappears people. The one that let's minorities meet their end by the hands of police brutality and racists mobs alike. The one with loose child safety laws. The one where children vanish in adoption centers and foster care systems and unwanted children centers. The one where school kids fear being shot.
It's the America I've always known, because the same America where my cousin died to his genetic heart condition after being refused his lifesaving medicine while in jail, only for the jail to try to fake his suicide as an attempted cover-up.
It's the same America where I worked as a child laborer underneath my abusive mother's hand for sixteen years by the age of eighteen, because child labor laws are incredibly loose.
It's the same America where while doordashing as a teen I had various grown men hit on me, and was followed home multiple times by tweakers in the dark (I'm also 4'10" so it's not like they mistook me for an adult)
It's the same America where a kid took a loaded gun onto my brother's school bus, demanding to know where he was the day he walked home, because despite the fact he told the school that a student threatened to shoot him afterschool, they didn't do anything
It's the same America where I can name multiple people I know who were sexually assaulted as children in the foster care system.
It's the same America where people slowed down their car to shout the n-word with a hard R at my brother and I as we walked home from school.
It's the same America where my partner and I was kicked out of her mother-in-law's place for being gay (we're ace-lesbians)
It's the same America where my dad broke into tears after my brother made an edgy AIDS joke in middle school, because it reminded him of his cousin who died horribly to the disease during the AIDS epidemic
It's the same America where my dad was given the choice to die painfully and horrifically but live a few months longer, or die as soon as possible in the comfort of the hospital, because Medicaid wouldn't cover a plan that both allows him to live longer and die peacefully and painlessly.
It's the same America where I was taught stories of lynchings, slavery, human experimentation, overseas massacres, the trail of tears, forced sterilizations, and vietnam war.
It's the same America I've always known.
