Escape to the Land of the Free

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It’s freezing cold, the snow is deep, I have no coat, and I have no home, yet I have not felt this level of joy in years. I don’t know where they’re taking me, and I don’t really care. I am one of the lucky ones who escaped the civil war and made it across the border, to Canada.

It’s been 18 years since Donald Trump was elected as the President of the United States of America. After one term, he removed the citizen’s right to vote for our representatives in Congress. He explained that he was doing this for our own good: “People are voting against their own best interest because they don’t understand politics. It’s better if I assign representatives for each state; we can get more done that way.”

Some of them protested, there’s no doubt about it. What is in doubt is whether those protesters are alive or dead now. They were taken away, nobody knows where. After Donald Trump’s second term as President, he removed the term limits and Congress unanimously voted him to a third term. During his third term, he removed the voting process altogether.

Looking back now, even those who voted for Trump now realize what a catastrophic mistake this was.  Oh, they loved him early on, as he mandated all Mexicans be rounded up, put into trains and sent south to Mexico.  A great deal of the military men quit in protest, but that didn’t stop Trump; there were still enough men in uniform to execute his plan. It was impossible to stop this wave of oppression. It didn’t matter how many rifles the citizens had; the government had jets, tanks, drones and guided missiles. It was no contest.

Guatemalans, Argentineans, Chileans, none was safe. They were all grouped as ‘Mexicans’ and taken away. They did the same thing with the Muslims after they branded them with a TRUMP ID. Many were locked up without ever being given a fair trial, or any trial at all, for that matter.  Some of them got out, left the United States to go to the Middle East, Europe, Africa, anywhere but here.  Thousands were captured and put into cargo ships and sent away.  Where exactly ‘away’ is, we don’t know.

Mosques were burned to the ground. Some of them by the government, and some of them by the citizens who now had free reign to conduct religious terrorism at will, with no threat of retribution from the United States Federal Government. The streets were filled with violence, from the east coast to the west.

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I was able to keep my journal with me and just glanced back at this entry:

April 20, 2017: I waited until the last day possible to check in with the authorities for processing, and get my TRUMP ID. We had 90 days to comply, after Donald Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States of America on Friday, January 20, 2017

TRUMP.I.D._MS_MX_BL_LI_HI_00000001

The categories for Known or Suspected Terrorists are: 

Nothing was sacred or respected after the election. Store fronts with Spanish names, even restaurants were destroyed and the authorities did nothing. Well, that’s not entirely true, sometimes the authorities led the charge to destroy any type of gathering center where English wasn’t spoken. The town where I am from went from 90,000 people down to about 40,000 people as some were taken away and others fled in desperation. There were no longer enough people to work at all the restaurants and hotels, grocery stores and Walmarts.

It became increasingly difficult to keep food in the cupboards as workers who previously labored day and night packaging consumer goods, loading and unloading trucks and trains, all the people doing the back-breaking work on the farmers’ fields picking onions, lettuce and potatoes, and so many of the workers who processed millions of cattle, pig, chickens and turkey in the slaughter houses, they were all gone.

They were chased away. They were beaten publicly. They were the backbone of our economy. Then they were all gone.

During Trump’s first term he rejected all funding requests for social services that help provide food, housing, and heat for the poor.  During his second term, after Trump removed the elected Congress and replaced them with his own representatives, all ‘liberal socialist policies’ were removed from the books.  Even the funding for state-run universities was canceled. ‘Local control’ is better, they said.

It’s funny how they didn’t think this through, those who voted for Trump. They roared with laughter, nodding their head with approval as Trump stereotyped Muslims as terrorists, Mexicans as rapist and thieves, and blacks as lazy. By far, the majority of people receiving government assistance in the U.S. back in 2016 were Caucasians. That’s a fact. They gave Trump power, and Trump removed their safety net, the welfare they relied on either because they had no job, or their job at places like Walmart paid so little, they couldn’t afford to pay their own rent, utilities and groceries.

The middle class all but disappeared as the economy collapsed without enough workers to do the jobs. Manufacturing jobs were sent overseas. There was no sense in having tech jobs where programmers and engineers work on the latest advancements for phones and computers when nobody could afford to buy the products. Couple that with the massive tax breaks to the top 5% wealthiest Americans, and there became a great divide between the rich and the poor.

In every town and city, crowds of homeless people lived on the streets, in the alleys, on benches at the park, all of them starving, and services were nonexistent in most places. Houses were foreclosed on and locked up, the banks and the federal government would rather have those houses empty, they would rather have people living on the streets, if they weren’t able to pay their rent.  Word spread near and far when a soup kitchen opened up at one town or another.

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With the collapse of the middle-class job sector, college degrees became useless.  The only reliable paying jobs were with the government’s crowd control force, and in the military.  We were at war with half the nations in the Middle East. We were at war with half the nations in Europe.  We were at war with African nations and Central America too.  We were always at war.  With no revenue coming in, the federal government sold off the national parks to oil companies and even leased the land to foreign governments who came in and reaped the rewards of the rich natural resources contained within the forests and below the ground. Coal, wood, oil, water, it was all for sale. Trump said we had to sell it all, to finance the wars to fight for freedom because, … America.

With no jobs to earn an income, no welfare to buy food, and no minorities to bully, they turned their anger toward each other.  Suddenly the Protestants, Catholics, the Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, the Presbyterians, they all went to war against each other. Somebody had to be blamed for the egregious environment they lived in, and they certainly weren’t going to blame themselves. They never did. It was Civil War 2.0.

Houses were burned to the ground.  Churches were burned; entire towns were burned to the ground.  All because ‘they’ were a threat to somebody else’s way of life. One of the militia groups sent a boat full of explosives out to Ellis island and set it off, destroying Lady Liberty, just to make sure it was clear that no immigrants are welcome here. Federal buildings were bombed and there were no more Muslims around to place the blame on, only militia groups, the ‘Patriots’, the ‘Real Americans’.

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From Denver, Colorado to Calgary, Alberta, my trek was a rough couple of days. There were no functioning gas stations anywhere along the route through desolate, dry and cold Wyoming. There were no hotels or restaurants to serve travelers on their way.  Not that it mattered if there had been, I certainly didn’t have any money to pay. I don’t know anybody that had a job over the past 4 years or longer.  I had heard it was easier going if I took the lesser known back roads rather than the interstate, and they were correct.  Best advice I ever got.  Hidden in the backcountry were small communities of minorities who took to hiding when all hell broke loose years earlier.  They provided myself and others I traveled with a hot meal, fresh well water, and even a little bit of food to take with us on our continued journey north.

The Mexicans and blacks throughout Wyoming helped us survive as we tried to stay hidden from the Patriots who ran amok across the land. I hear the Muslims that went into hiding across the east coast are helping the whites who are trying to escape the violence of the Patriot militia in that area.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to that land, the United States of America. As it is now, the land is in ruin. My best guess is a coalition of authoritarian regimes abroad will purchase the land from Trump, and the land of the free will be nothing but a distant memory.

I’m just glad to be in Canada, especially since they built a wall.

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Photo credit: Getty Images