Adena M'lynn's Voice

At first, they said Guantánamo Bay was for the worst of the worst. Terrorists. Foreigners. Threats to “our way of life.” So the law took a vacation.  And we built cages offshore, so we wouldn’t have to feel the cold steel of hate on our soil. We called it safety. But it was only silence.  Then came the blueprints — for a new version of horror. Now, the United States is talking up (testing the rebuke) and preparing to send its own citizens — uncharged, unconvicted — to rot inside El Salvador’s mega-prison,  a brutal fortress where inmates are stripped of names, dignity, and light. Not tried. Not heard.  Just gone. This is not about justice. This is about power.  And leading the charge? A convicted felon turned president — Donald Trump — and his second in command, Vance, nodding along like a bobblehead with a microphone. This isn’t about safety.  It’s about submission.  They’re next in line.  And if you stay quiet now,  one day the trai...

How federal cuts are stripping away what little safety net remains for the aging and vulnerable across rural America. The cracks in rural America’s foundation aren’t just showing — they’re widening. And now, federal cuts, rising tariffs, and a weakening economy are hammering those cracks into deep, dangerous fractures. The safety nets once barely holding rural communities together — food assistance, heating programs, medical aid — are being ripped away, thread by thread. And just like the Great Depression nearly a century ago, it’s the poor, the elderly, and the already forgotten who feel it first. Federal Cuts: Slicing Through the Fragile Support System For many in rural America, programs like SNAP, Meals on Wheels, Medicaid, and LIHEAP aren’t extras — they are survival. But today… Proposed federal budgets aim to slash funding for Meals on Wheels, threatening meals for over 2.2 million seniors.  Cuts to SNAP benefits could leave millions facing worsening food insecurity, e...

At Auschwitz, death was not a side effect.  It was the product. Birkenau — the sprawling maze of misery — was built not by monsters,  but by men who thought efficiency was virtue,  and human life was a resource to be stripped, squeezed, and discarded. Before the gates screamed “Arbeit Macht Frei” — “Work sets you free” —  there were plans drawn in offices,  contracts signed in clean, bright rooms,  meetings over coffee and cigarettes. They talked about train schedules,  about Zyklon B supply lines,  about labor quotas,  the way you might plan a new highway or a factory expansion. Photo credit:  https://www.history.com/articles/auschwitz And the people? The millions? The Jews, the Romani, the Poles, the Soviet POWs, the gay men, the disabled, the dissenters, the rebels, the ones deemed “undesirable” for the crime of existing —  they became numbers on lists. Cargo to be moved. Flesh to be processed. That was Auschwitz. — That...

There’s a quiet cruelty settling over rural          America — not with gunshots or sirens, but with the slow, grinding absence of what once was nearby: food, medicine, help. The distance itself is killing — mile by mile, closure by closure — as critical services evaporate, and communities are left to fend for themselves across endless stretches of land and silence. This is not a theoretical threat. This is happening right now. And if the trend continues, the collapse won’t be confined to the countryside — it will ripple far wider than many realize. Food: When Fresh Groceries Become a Distant Memory Once upon a time, even the smallest town had a grocery store — maybe two. Today, tens of thousands of rural Americans live in food deserts, areas where the nearest supermarket is often 10 miles or more away. As of 2023, the USDA estimates over 2.3 million rural residents live in food deserts. Dollar stores and gas stations have replaced grocery stores in many rural ...