"In God's Country" by Beck Duffield

 In God’s country, poverty is a myth. 

In God’s country, racism doesn’t exist.

In God’s country, every neighborhood is your kind of neighborhood.

In God’s country, you can pronounce everything on the menu and converse easily with the waitstaff. 

In God’s country, everyone knows the lyrics of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”

In God’s country, everyone stands for the same flag, sings the same songs, holds the same hats over the same hearts. 

In God’s country, there’s always a cold beer waiting for you at the end of a long day. Or the beginning of one. Or both.

In God’s country, Sundays are for church and football. 

In God’s country, the only tattoos are military symbols and bible verses. 

In God’s country, everyone is armed to the teeth. 

In God’s country, your kids would never dream of deciding to be gay. 

In God’s country, your son gets his ass kicked for wearing a dress to prom. 

In God’s country, you’ll drop a $20 in the plate but call the cops on the homeless.

In God’s country, you exploit cheap immigrant labor then vote to have them deported. 

In God’s country, women know their place and men know how to keep them there. 

In God’s country, school children go hungry while choking on bullets, thoughts, and prayers. 

In God’s country, this is a Christian nation founded on Christian principles like slavery and homophobia and misogyny. 

In God’s country, family members are cut off for leaving churches and speaking truth to abuse. 

In God’s country, no one goes to gay weddings even if the brides and grooms are sons and daughters. There wasn’t any cake anyway. 

In God’s country, girls are raped because of what they wore or what they drank. They should have covered up and known better. 

In God’s country, businesses get to pick and choose who to serve or fire for any reason.

In God’s country, publicly funded entities have religious affiliations and discriminate based on them. 

In God’s country, boys get their first beer with Dad by the lake at 13. They grab wings at Hooters afterwards. 

In God’s country, the wife needs to remember who the head of the damn household is.

In God’s country, you say grace in public. 

In God’s country, hijabs must be removed for identification purposes. 

In God’s country, there’s a cross in the classroom but books are banned.

In God’s country, they erect statues of traitors and murderers in the town square because they’re distant relatives of ours and they really did have a point.

In God’s country, they name parks after slavers so everyone remembers how much weight those tree branches can hold.

In God’s country, they make their daughters take purity pledges at 14.

In God’s country, they don’t believe their daughters when they accuse family members of molestation. 

In God’s country, they torture queers to save their souls. 

In God’s country, wives and mothers build entire personalities around getting wine drunk as often as possible. 

In God’s country, songs praise Jesus and drunkenness and cut-off jeans in the same sentence. 

In God’s country, unhappy women are sent to bible study and then divorced for not looking slutty enough. 

In God’s country, men will stuff a dollar in a stripper’s G-string, but won’t give her a chance to interview for a job. 

In God’s country, poverty is a choice. Charity should only be given to animals or churches. 

In God’s country, every other God is lie but yours is 100% real. 

In God’s country, ten-year-old girls are forced into motherhood because it was God’s will that a child be raped by a grown man. 

In God’s country, high school students learn what death rattles sound like while hiding from gunshots under their desks. 

In God’s country, queer boys are dragged behind trucks and left tied to trees in fields to die. 

In God’s country, judges are concerned about ruining the lives of promising young rapists. 

In God’s country, rapists sit on the highest bench in the land. 

In God’s country, chemical-laden fast food is affordable and growing community vegetable gardens on sidewalks is illegal. 

In God’s country, they sell diet plans to the abusive mothers of twelve-year-olds and watch them starve, permanently damaging their developing brains in the name of thinness. 

In God’s country, they praise their sons for their sexual conquests and shame their daughters for the same. 

In God’s country, sexy women are sluts and all other women are bitches. There’s no in-between. 

In God’s country, their governing philosophy is a document written in the 1700s by slavers and misogynists who didn’t believe most members of the current population were people at all. 

In God’s country, they invade a kingdom, overthrow it, outlaw their language, imprison their queen, and then accuse them of putting on their culture for the tourists who ruin their land. 

In God’s country, they rob peoples of their ancestral homes and round them up in trailer parks full of alcoholism and smallpox blankets. They should be thanking their government for the accommodations and the tax breaks. 

In God’s country, men and women were hanged and burned for knowing which plants could cure a toothache or soothe a sunburn. 

In God’s country, citizens are murdered by their own police force. The murderers walk free for months before the mildest consequences possible are exacted. 

In God’s country, corporations report record profits while households report record struggle. 

In God’s country, you’re not owed a living wage for full time work. You’re lucky to have a job at all. 

In God’s country, the rich deserve everything they have and the poor deserve to starve. 

In God’s country, one illness is enough to bankrupt a family for generations. 

In God’s country, “now remains faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love.”

In God’s country, no one should wear masks or take shots or stay home to save the lives of others. You haven’t had a tall boy with the Applebees regulars in days.

In God’s country, anyone who steps on your property gets a gun pointed at them. 

In God’s country, anyone who isn’t white takes the bullet. 

In God’s country, burning crosses merge into blue lines. 

In God’s country, infants are measured in terms of “domestic supply.” 

In God’s country, the poor and the sick aren’t allowed to vote.

In God’s country, children perish from deadly viruses in cages because they were born on the wrong side of an invisible line in the sand. 

In God’s country, Mary carries her fourth iPad because, dammit, she keeps dropping them, while Martha has to share the one library computer that serves her entire high school. And they call this equal educational opportunity. 

In God’s country, public bathrooms are locked because homeless people don’t deserve access to toilet tissue and soap late at night. 

In God’s country, kids watch their friends overdose on drugs because they’re afraid they’ll go to jail for life if they call for help. 

In God’s country, it’s illegal to feed the poor without a permit. 

In God’s country, theocrats are called terrorists as long as they are brown. 

In God’s country, tyrants are called dictators as long as they aren’t white.

In God’s country, imperialism is a gift to the weak from the strong. 

In God’s country, they say “give us this day our daily bread” and refuse to pay workers enough to feed their families. 

In God’s country, your right to carry a gun is more important than my kid’s right not to be killed by one. 

In God’s country, a woman’s rapist can sue her for aborting his baby. 

In God’s country, coaches demand genital checks for all their female athletes. 

In God’s country, entire generations bond with their parents through plexiglass.

In God’s country, kids recite the pledge, “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” before they’re old enough to realize that every word is an outright lie. 

In God’s country, those children are only protected until they’re actually born. 

In God’s country, people line up and do what they’re told. 

In God’s country, we stop resisting. 

In God’s country, we can’t breathe. 

In God’s country, godliness left a long time ago.