To where would we return?
To the miniscule fraction of the initial US population with voting rights, where
only land-owning white men could vote?
To the Trail of Tears and its swath of death, starvation, and fear?
To the rough-hewn huts bordering the very plantations causing so much abuse and suffering?
To the Fugitive Slave Act, the slave codes, the black codes, and the Jim Crow laws seen through by rabid racists?
To the Chinese Exclusion Act or to NINA?
To riots, hangings, stonings, jailings, and killings
on account of race, religion, ethnicity, gender or sexual identity, and ideas in general
differing from those of the perpetrator,
deemed to be an evil?
To children laboring in and dying from factories?
To silencing and shutting out the very voices that make us "us" and help our successes?
The accumulation of all these and so many
infinitely more
leads us to where we are today,
an imperfect society
with success in its scopes
with a foundation of turtles
with a rising generation
sparking potential
That's why we’re here: to restore the world
(not country)
with future glory.