America: The Evil Empire

Red or blue, the war machine rages on.

In some of the most famous works of fiction, the antagonist is a power-hungry evil tyrant that aims to subjugate the entire world. The nation they rule tramples on millions of people in their march to world domination. Sometimes, as in Avatar the Last Airbender’s Fire Nation, that means an entire planet. Other times, as in Star Wars’ Galactic Empire, that means entire galaxies. When we see this in works of fiction, we immediately know who we are meant to root for — the underdog protagonist and their ragtag group of rebels opposing an oppressive hegemonic nation-state. It’s easy to root for Aang and Luke Skywalker because we see how the Evil Empire that they oppose infringes on citizens' rights all over their world or worlds. However, in the real world, Evil Empires still exist. Many of us, myself included, live in these Evil Empires and directly benefit from their global domination. Unfortunately, we never hear the ragtag protagonist’s side of the story.

Was this what we voted for?

Millions of Americans spent all summer and fall tirelessly demanding that we change our President. Some of us volunteered and called our neighbors, and many more of us vote-shamed strangers on social media. The premise was that Donald Trump was uniquely dangerous, and had to be replaced. How much you liked or disliked his replacement didn’t matter because no matter what, he was guaranteed to be better than Trump. Now that Joe Biden has officially committed his first war crime as President, this honeymoon phase of ‘at least he’s not Trump’ must finally come to an end.

Cosmetic changes of an oppressive system do nothing for the oppressed.

Bombing Syria, or any other country, is wrong. The United States’ government has been invading foreign countries, then crying foul when they are retaliated against for decades now. Many of us have a strange belief that we’re ‘spreading democracy’ across the globe. However, this begs the question…