We promise freedom, then burn it down.
The Road That Opened My Eyes
I’ve been fortunate to travel a lot this year. Much of it driving. You see and feel more on the road. Not the polished bits—the truth. The fabric of our country most people don’t want to see… and “they” don’t want you to know about.
I was driving from Santa Fe to Abiquiú. A clear, sunny day. High desert beauty all around. Layered colors of mountains and rock formations. My ritual playlist on. A week of deep ritual and shadow work ahead. I never know how these weeks will go.
All in the name of progress—the lie we keep telling ourselves.
Knowing History vs. Seeing It
In Santa Fe, I stayed near a park known to be populated with the unhoused. I parked next to a run-down car: front quarter a different color, bumper missing. My first thought: Will my rental be safe? Not, Damn, they must be fixing it after an accident.
I was wrong. After talking with the owner, I learned exactly that—they were repairing it—and my car (and I) were perfectly safe. It was fucked up that I still jumped to the assumption of “criminal.”
The next day, I walked to a coffee shop about six blocks away. Ahead of me was a Latina woman. She peered back once. I thought, Girl, same. Gotta watch out for dangerous men. As women, we’re used to watching our backs, keeping heads on swivels.
We rounded a corner. She looked back again. I said, “I promise, I’m not following you.” And smiled. She paused and said something like, “You never know who might be trying to grab you these days.”
“True,” I said.
But later that night it hit me. She wasn’t just worried about men. She was also watching for masked, unidentified “agents” who might try to take her to a detention center.
Fuck.
That’s not something I had to think about. As a white woman, I don’t have to worry about that.
This is white privilege.
A couple of days later, I left Santa Fe. Heavy. Sad. Angry about what’s happening in our country—and the world.
Santa Fe shrank in my rear-view mirror. The polished neighborhoods faded. The well-kept homes and gated communities gave way to rural reality. Small adobe houses. Trailers. The farther I drove, the more worn the homes became. Weathered by desert, storms, and time. Landscapes replaced by spare parts and broken-down cars. Windows covered in plastic or boarded up. Siding replaced with particle board.
I thought about the books I’ve read on this trip—Buffalo Dreamer by Violet Duncan, Moonbones by Brooke Reich, Washing My Mother’s Body by Joy Harjo.
I thought about what white colonizers did to Indigenous people. Not new knowledge, but this time it landed harder.
Tears streamed down my face as I drove deeper into the hills. Holding the ideals this country was founded on in one hand and the truth of how it was built in the other. How we’ve wiped out anything in the way of our plans. People. Animals. Nature. We squeeze every ounce out, then toss it aside.
Why do we think we know best? Why believe everything must bend to our will? All it’s ever caused is destruction. Death. Extinction.
There’s a difference between “knowing” what happened from your couch and traveling to see how echoes of the past ripple in the present.
There’s also a difference between believing you’ve dismantled your biases and actually placing yourself in spaces where you are the minority—watching your body and mind react.
We’ve been trained to think that if something isn’t perfect, polished, and like us, it’s dangerous.
Freedom for Some, Never for All
How must the first colonists have felt when they arrived? New land. New people. Different language, homes, customs. People living with the land in ways they dismissed as “primitive.”
The colonists came to escape tyranny. To seek freedom. So why did they take it from Indigenous people?
Humans are the apex predators. Our only threats are Mother Nature and us. And we’ve made a sport of hunting each other.
No one has the right to strip another person’s culture, beliefs, home, or life—especially not in the name of progress.
We took their land. Ripped away their children. Spread disease. Erased spirituality and ways of life. Rape. Starvation. Torture. Killed anyone who didn’t comply.
“Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” — R. H. Pratt
What in the actual fuck?
And now we’re doing it again—to immigrants—in the most disgusting ways I’ve seen in my lifetime.
A Pattern We Refuse to Break
Today, “others” includes anyone who is not a white, straight, conservative Christian male. If that’s not you—you’re an “other.” Open your fucking eyes, my friends.
And is this white guilt? You better believe it. Pain for genocides. Shame that “my people,” white people, did to others what they themselves were fleeing.
White guilt is knowing that Jefferson condemned slavery in his first draft of the Declaration of Independence—only to have it removed so Southern delegates would back independence. That omission has shaped centuries of injustice.
What happened to Africans and continues to happen to African Americans is catastrophic.
How Native Americans have been—and continue to be—treated is cataclysmic.
What we’re doing to immigrants, even legal citizens, is ruinous.
What humans do to each other is fucking appalling.
I have one lived experience. My own. I am imperfect. I am white. I am a woman. I am neurodivergent. I am queer. I am non-Christian. Even with that limited but privileged lens, I know what we’ve done—and what’s happening now—is wrong.
The Call to Rise Up
I call and email my representatives. I sign petitions. I donate. I check in with friends and neighbors. But it’s not enough.
I am so fucking angry at all the middle-class moderate and liberal white people with their heads in the sand because it doesn’t touch them. I know MANY. And it’s time to wake the fuck up.
To the white people on the sidelines waiting for it to pass: it won’t.
We have to rise up.
If you believe in the spirit of what the colonists fought for, use it. Make a better world for all. Because this—what we’ve been doing since the dawn of time—is killing us.
Wake the fuck up.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness.”
— Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
They wrote these truths nearly 250 years ago.
We’re still waiting for them to be true.
