Freedom for Whom?

The current political climate in the United States is profoundly toxic, and in truth, this is not a recent development. I began to notice its severity during the presidency of George W. Bush, particularly in his second term, while I was still in college. That period marked the beginning of my awareness of how deeply rooted our national divisions are, and how fraught our understanding of freedom has always been.

We pride ourselves on being "the land of the free," yet we remain locked in conflict over who qualifies for that freedom. This ongoing struggle is not an anomaly; rather, it reflects American culture in its most unfiltered form. Our founding fathers and our current leaders may be separated by centuries, but their philosophies and shortcomings are more alike than we often care to admit.

Progress, when it comes, is often undermined. For every visible advancement, there seems to be an equally powerful regression. This cyclical dynamic hinders any meaningful transformation.

As a society, we continue to resist the reality that human beings come in a spectrum of identities and experiences. Differences in how we eat, pray, love, move, speak, or dress become perceived threats. Our tribalistic tendencies render us incapable of embracing diversity. The presence of a head covering, a prayer to a deity unfamiliar to us, or even a culturally different cuisine like injera, can provoke irrational outrage.

This isn’t new. The colonial mindset that first arrived on this land carried the same logic: "Those people didn’t build roads like we did? They must be inferior. They must be eliminated." The idea that entire cultures can be deemed unworthy of existence because they do not conform to the dominant narrative is a sickness that has been passed down through generations.

If humanity could evolve past this tribal framework and embrace a global, cooperative mindset, we might finally unlock our full potential. But it is our addiction to conformity and groupthink—the refusal to make room for the unfamiliar—that continues to erode any hope for true unity.

Our capacity for prejudice is disturbingly adaptable. Today, it’s trans people. Tomorrow, it could be anyone who wears green shoes on a Thursday afternoon. Our intolerance simply migrates to whatever target is deemed socially acceptable at the time. This is not evolution; it’s moral stagnation.

We build artificial boundaries to exclude. We developed economic systems designed to elevate the few and suppress the many. And in a world with more than enough resources to provide for everyone, we’ve created barriers—economic, political, and cultural—that make access to basic necessities harder than ever. Ironically, this is happening at a time when we are more efficient and technologically advanced than any previous era in human history.

In many ways, humanity is failing this grand experiment. At times, it seems that the only hope for our survival might lie in the intervention of a higher, more enlightened species. Because as things stand, we remain, metaphorically, apes on the grassland—still fighting over a single piece of fruit, never realizing that the tree is full and could feed us all, if only we were willing to share.

Later,

DD