What happens when we go to war with ourselves?

What happens when we go to war with ourselves? We fight our brothers and our cousins and our mothers, our children, our friends, colleagues and mentors. What happens when we start to tear at the seams, breaking apart the bonds of trust and objective truth?

We tear open all that is dear to us, and slowly kill ourselves.

I cannot say when the trust in America was broken between her and her people. No government is perfect, after all. She simply strives to be a more perfect union, much like any one of us does. Somewhere along her growth, her children lost sight of objective truths. And now everything is known and unknown, and nothing has any real certainty. Her children, you and I amongst them, we are scared. Tell me I am wrong. Tell me that fear does not exist inside of you. We are all looking for a leader to help us brave our fear. But this fear has grown into some untamable monster hiding in the shadows, preying on each of us in our weakest moments. Without objective truths, leaders can come from anywhere, and can be anyone. How can we possibly find a way through the darkness?

I was recently interviewed for a magazine and was asked to explain some of my frustrations with the fact that cancer was relatively untraceable and how it was difficult to discover its origins. When I was diagnosed with metastatic PTC, or papillary thyroid carcinoma, back in 2022, I put up walls around a feeling that leaked through cracks in my resolve throughout the years. I did not know it, but I was devastated that my PTC’s origins could be from anywhere. That was scary because there was just no real conceivable way to prevent something like this if my doctors cannot even tell me why it occurred in the first place. And yet, I have such a strong family history with cancer. It is so difficult not to point my finger at my own familial legacy, and a nuclear one at that.

I have a specific and direct tie to nuclear resources, power, and weaponry, and I cannot say for certain that it had anything to do with my cancer. This is the case for thousands of others, but it is not because of what science lacks, but rather, what the US government did to manipulate objective truth to become speculative correlation. 

There is a group of people in the southwest that were generationally impacted by the testing of the first atomic bomb known as the Tularosa Basin Downwinders. These are people who were born, raised, or descended from people living in the Tularosa Basin, an area encapsulating the Trinity site and immediate fallout from the detonation of the atomic bomb. The people present when the bomb was tested were not recognized or included in RECA, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, until this year, 2025. Only uranium miners from New Mexico were included in the one act recognizing people affected by nuclear testing. Those included had to have been present in a designated downwinder area between 1944 and 1962.

While monumental to have New Mexican Downwinders included in RECA, RECA does not acknowledge the potential generational impacts nuclear testing has on anyone. This brings me back to my frustration, as there are thousands of families, just like mine, that have a nuclear legacy passed down generation after generation in the form of various unexplainable cancers. Nothing is thoroughly studied or recognized about the generations that come after first generation downwinders. Moreover, even if there was, it is not like the government can pay for reparations for generation after generation. Perhaps generational healing is an inevitability, given enough time.

Regardless, there is no real recognition for the generations that come after, the ones who are still impacted decades later. It is impossible to trace my disease through my familial DNA, and even if it was, the sheer probability of it being related to the atomic bomb is small. But this does not erase the fact that I am the fifth generation of my family to have cancer since the bomb was tested. It does not change the fact that so many other families face the same reality, some even worse. It does not change the fact that there were no significant measures taken to evacuate the local citizens of New Mexico when manufacturing and detonating the world’s first nuclear weapon. It does not change the fact that very few Americans know what a downwinder is, or how many of them exist, and how they are located all around America. 

These objective truths were blurred and hidden, just like so many today. The flow of information has become America’s deadliest weapon. But it is also her most powerful tool. America can heal, she has to heal. She has to rediscover her own objective truths, rebuild, become a more perfect union, and find trust again with her children. I hope as her children we detangle objective truths from the webs of misinformation so that we might find the courage to move towards her more perfect union.