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,
I love you, but you’ve broken my heart.
I have watched your promises bend under the weight of power, your ideals stretched thin by policies that forget the people they were meant to serve. I have watched democracy become something people invoke more often than they protect. Too many voices are silenced by systems designed to exhaust them. Too many people are told survival is the same thing as freedom.
And still, I cannot let you go.
Because I know democracy is more than elections and speeches and flags waving in the summer heat. To me, democracy is the belief that every person deserves dignity, safety, and the ability to shape the future they live in. It is the radical idea that no one should be disposable. Democracy is listening. It is accountability. It is protecting each other even when it is inconvenient. It is believed that the country belongs not only to the powerful, but to all of us.
I wish older generations understood that my generation did not inherit stability; we inherited crisis after crisis and were asked to call it normal. We came of age during political division, climate anxiety, school shootings, economic instability, and the constant fear that rights we thought were guaranteed could disappear overnight. We are often called cynical, but the truth is we learned early that institutions can fail. And yet we still organize, still care, still fight for each other. There is hope in that persistence.
I see that hope in communities across this country. I see it in people building mutual aid networks when systems fail them. I see it in young people refusing to stay silent about injustice. I see it in LGBTQ+ people creating joy and safety for one another, even while being debated like abstractions instead of human beings. I see it in neighbors feeding each other, protecting each other, mourning together, and rebuilding together. These are the stories the country should hear, not only stories of division, but stories of ordinary people choosing compassion anyway.
And despite everything, there is still so much I love about you.
I love the passion of your people, the way they continue to dream loudly even in difficult times. I love your mountains and deserts and coastlines, your forests older than memory and skies that seem to stretch forever. I love that somewhere between your crowded cities and quiet rural roads, every kind of person is trying, in their own way, to build a life filled with meaning.
What should America become in the next 250 years?
I hope you become softer where you have been cruel. More honest where you have hidden from your own history. I hope you become a country where democracy is measured not by mythology, but by how well people are actually cared for. A country where freedom is not reserved for the privileged, and where no child grows up believing they are less worthy of safety, dignity, or love.
I hope you become brave enough to change.
Not because you are perfect, but because you are unfinished.
I am still here. Still heartbroken. Still hopeful. Still believing that your greatest strength has never been your power, but your people and their endless ability to imagine something better.
With both grief and love,
Riley Reed, 26, Washington, DC
