I understand your sentiment, I really do. We also need economic reparations for black people, to redesign the police system, and to ensure LGBT people are represented in society and education.

It's ironic to me how much I hated the country back when I was a senior in high school, 2012 -- and now how it's in many ways worse today in 2024. There have been advancements, and those need to be celebrated, but there have been significant setbacks and reversion. I never thought I'd live to see an era even more hostile to LGBT people, in many ways.

I'm not going to tell you that I've learned to love the country in spite of its many faults -- but I have learned to recognize that we are a country that owned slaves, and also freed slaves. We enacted Jim Crow, and we passed the Voting Rights Act. We didn't let gays serve in the military, then we enacted Don't Ask Don't Tell, and then we stopped caring if soldiers were openly gay.

America is a story of oppressors and liberators. Those who only let rich white men vote, and those who protested until women and black people could vote. America is all of them. We can pick though who we extol as model Americans, and who we condemn as our worst.

To tie things back to what you're saying, we need to preserve the human rights we have right now above all else, before we can expand them to everyone who deserves them. In 2016 people were unhappy that we weren't expanding more, and it led to us losing abortion rights we already had.

We protect those we can, and we wait for our moment. We do our damnedest to make sure we don't regress, and when the time comes, we honor the woman's suffragists and civil rights marchers and secure expansions.

Before we can expand, we have to bury these Trump fascists six feet under. Only then can we get around to fixing our many problems.