Can I Speak to Someone More Senior?
I was born into a settler-colonial hallucination with no opt-out menu and would like to lodge a formal complaint.
As the current iteration of American political reality unfolds—chaotic, punitive, and seemingly designed for maximal psychic dissonance—I find myself gripped by a strange frustration: I was never consulted. Not about the place, the time, or the terms of my arrival.
There was no pre-natal advisory session.
No orientation packet.
No checkbox for “non-authoritarian polity with breathable air, plausible public discourse, and functioning democratic mechanisms.”
And yet, here I am—grafted into a national mythology that never asked for my participation, only my compliance.
Even now, I'm still trying to parse the fine print of this assignment. But from what I can gather, I was born into a settler-colonial enterprise built atop a stolen continent, rationalized by something called the Doctrine of Discovery—a medieval real estate theory in which European flags had magic land-claiming powers, and the inhabitants of entire continents were deemed “non-Christian” enough to disappear.
The economic engine of this nation? Slavery. Not incidental, not regrettable-but-external—but constitutive. Built-in. An unpaid labor platform that allowed freedom to bloom for a few by chaining it to the backs of the many.
The ideological software? White supremacy. Not a bug, not a leftover glitch—but the operating system. Still running in background processes today.
And the ecological footprint? More like a bootprint. Forests razed, rivers poisoned, species erased—all for extraction and expansion. Capitalism’s version of manifest destiny, playing out across biomes, watersheds, and planetary boundaries.
So forgive me for asking—but:
Can I speak to someone more senior?
Because I don’t recall signing up for a nation that treats Indigenous sovereignty like a historical inconvenience, that exports democracy the way it used to export sugar and slaves, that wraps empire in the language of freedom and sells it back to itself on cable news.
I don’t recall agreeing to a system where billionaires build bunkers, Black children get body-searched, and the rest of us are told to vote harder.
I don’t recall clicking “Accept All Cookies” on the collective hallucination that this is the best we can do.
Look—I get that this might be above your pay grade. I get that maybe the whole Pre-Natal Assignment Desk was underfunded, outsourced, or AI-optimized to maximize narrative conflict. But still: if there’s someone I can talk to—a supervisor, a mid-level seraph, a demiurge with jurisdiction—I’d appreciate a conversation.
Preferably with someone who remembers how to spell “society.”