As part of a collaboration between The Fulcrum's NextGen initiative and Made By Us, The Fulcrum is publishing Letters to America, a series created through the Youth250 project that invites Gen Z to reflect on the nation’s past, present, and future as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary.
America is built on values. Its first official texts announce the importance of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those three things might have slightly different meanings to individual people. But our understanding of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness isn’t so different that we miss the larger picture.
Most of us can agree what these three things aren’t: selling American lives for oil, allowing government officials to invade private spaces to selectively enforce immigration rules, or forcing women to have risky C-sections.
My parents are immigrants, and came to the U.S. as adults. They made the choice, willingly and joyfully, to pledge allegiance to this country. Nowhere is perfect, but my parents were happy that here, they had free access for their daughters to decent schools, economic opportunities, and free speech. My sisters and I were all born in the same hospital and raised in the same small city, and all we know is America. It is our country: my sister works for the government, my dad served his community in healthcare for over thirty years, and I am studying to become a lawyer. Any talk of going “home” goes nowhere, because this is our home. Immigrants are the backbone of this country, and they make America special.
But some of our policies and actions, right now, make it easy to forget the bold, unified, and free vision that compelled the original Americans to accept the Constitution and its promises.
For America’s 250th birthday, I picture a recommitment to what the founders sought in the revolution and wrote in our founding texts, even when they couldn’t always live up to it. No kings; dignity and respect for individuals; economic flourishing for all, not just aristocrats.
I spend a lot of my time telling my friends and family that two things can be simultaneously true: that life and this country are much better than they were 100 years ago, and that we could still be doing much better. People are physically healthier, live longer, live in less pain, have more free time, and have more rights than before. At the same time, America is the richest country in the world, and its people, my friends and family, often feel left behind. It’s sometimes hard to feel lucky when government officials intimidate, tear gas, assault, or even kill people for doing the first thing this country promised them: the right to free speech and assembly.
No one believes in the American dream like the people who chose to be here, and the young people like me who want to see this country flourish into my old age feel the stakes in trying to keep this country great and make it better. I don’t want to repeat the generational pattern: my grandparents fled Palestine, and my parents fled Kuwait. I want my daughter to grow up in a free country that fully embodies its promises, to give her the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I choose this country, and I hope that together, we all choose it too.
Sara Abdulla, 29, Chicago, IL
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people