Stefan
Stefan
Vacaville, CA
Stefan, what’s your take on America at this time?
“I think that America has lost its way, has lost its soul. In a lot of ways, I’m starting to feel like maybe this experiment was a mistake from the beginning. There wasn’t much integrity in the way this country was founded. It was built on the back of slave labor, it was built with very specific people in mind, and not much room for anything outside of that arena. It was built by petty, childish white men competing with each other like little boys. These are our Founding Fathers. The railroads and industry and shipping and all that, these are all great developments, but at the end of the day it was just rich guys trying to get richer and put each other down.
“If you’re not a white, Christian male in this country, it’s difficult. It’s always made laws based on biblical dogma rather than what’s socially appropriate and what needs to be done for the country, and people aren’t being taken into consideration if they don’t fit into that class. Women, people of color, gay people, trans people, have a really difficult time in this new country, and I really think it’s time that we start basing our laws on our Constitution and not on a book that certain people believe in. I’m thirty-two and this doesn’t feel like the country that I was raised in, it doesn’t feel like the promises that were made to me as a child. It honestly has nothing to do with who is in the White House, it’s just the division in this country and the legislation based on religious dogma that have, I think, run the nation asunder, and I don’t think we’ll ever find our way back.”
Is there a solution to all this?
“There is no solution. It’s deep rooted. It’s systemic, and it’s been built into the framework of this country since day one. This idea of class and race supremacy is never going away, and where this division is even widening more is where all these oppressed people, these people that have been held back or don’t feel like this country represents them, we’re finally starting to speak up, we’re about to enter into another civil rights movement, we’re about to enter right back into the race relations we had in the sixties, particularly with some of these people who have been appointed to office, and it’s a terrifying time. I don’t think we come back from this. I think the only way to really save this country’s soul is to push the controllers out, and they’re never going anywhere. They’ve owned this country since day one and they don’t want us here and that’s just all there is to it. But we’re not going anywhere. Black people aren’t going anywhere, Hispanic people aren’t going anywhere, Asian people, gay people, women aren’t going anywhere. I think what’s happening in the government right now is the rich, white, powerful men who have run the country for so long are deathly afraid of losing their grip, and so they’re implementing new systems and new institutions to reclaim that power that they used to have. It really feels like the government is trying to take us back to the 1930s and take us back to Jim Crow and segregation and it’s terrifying.”
If you had a vision of a really great America, what would it look like?
“I don’t know what a really great America would look like. Every country has its problems, every nation has its ups and downs, every nation has divisions based on race and class and religion. It’s not America, it’s the world. We need to go back a few thousand years and make Christianity never happen. I’m not just personally against Christianity, but I think religion is what causes division. This idea of my God’s right, and you’re wrong, my way of believing things is right so yours must be wrong - this has been inherent to the human mentality for hundreds and hundreds of years, and it just keeps getting passed down from generation to generation.”
What’s your dream?
“Just to be happy and successful and not have to worry about being persecuted about the color of my skin or who I choose to sleep with. I want to see people treated equally. We’re all 75% water, we all have people we love, we all have family and dreams and goals and everybody just needs to be on the same level. We can’t have one group of people hoarding all the social and political power in this country and holding back the people who actually make up the framework of this country, because when you really do the math, white males 18-35 are in fact the minority, and they hate it. I don’t have a dream anymore, I’ve given up, honestly, I don’t think I’ll live here in the next five years. I don’t know where I would go, but I think somewhere not quite as dominated by white imperialism.”
