America is headed for a swift decline and we’re all paying the price.
Trends have a penchant of repeating every twenty years. The 1990s grunge made a return in the 2010s with flannels and chokers adorning the racks and shelves in department stores.
The 2020s, however, have taken inspiration from several different decades; Farrah Fawcett’s hair from the 1980s, low rise jeans from the 2000s and even firing squads from the 1960s.
It seems that old legislation is also making a comeback — in addition to legwarmers. On March 24, Idaho Gov. Brad Little signed a bill that would permit execution by firing squad.
Though death by firing squad is constitutional, state courts have ruled the method as unconstitutional and only four states authorize it. Execution by firing squad has only been performed four times since the 1960s.
Many pharmaceutical companies no longer sell the drugs for lethal injection because they are used for executions.
If pharmaceutical companies no longer want to participate in the often flawed system of capital punishment, resorting to excessive force seems like a temporary and violent solution.
And yet, this is only one of the many pieces of legislature that has set our country back a decade — or six.
White Mississippi lawmakers have made efforts to make appointed courts in a Black-majority community, and are now being deemed as “Jim Crow 2.0.” As in the laws that justified the segregation of Americans a mere 60 years ago.
Fashion is used as a tool for many to express or costume themselves. What you do — or do not — wear can communicate to the world. So fear not Republican legislators, you can still be a racist without a klan robe!
Some of these steps backwards don’t even require the creation of new legislature at all.
After Roe. v. Wade was overturned, it brought a magnifying glass to issues that we thought were already resolved. Now same-sex marriage and interracial marriage are potentially on the chopping block once again.
Here we have three issues that affect all American people in some capacity, that have been sanctioned and made into a right that has to now be debated once more.
America is regressing. And rather than focusing on issues that are actually affecting our citizens, we create problems out of thin air to solve instead of the ones right in our faces.
According to the Gun Violence, We have already surpassed 100 mass shootings in 2023, and we aren’t even a quarter of the way into the year. But instead of creating legislation to stop the preventable murders of children, legislators are more concerned about whether drag queens at libraries are damaging the youth. Luckily for them, there might not be any more youth to worry about.
No matter how many innocent people are killed, calls to representatives or how many times you revisit the names of those taken away far too soon, our efforts never are enough to elicit change.
Until we can identify the actual issues that plague Americans, we will never be able to move forward. The only thing we should be seeing from the 1950s is a poodle skirt, not the barbaric ways that they treated Americans.
