For Sale — United States

By Adena M’lynn 

We didn’t lose it in a war.
We listed it.

 Quietly, at first.

A small print notice at the bottom of the page.

Terms subject to change.

 

We sold minutes of attention.

Then hours.

Then whole days of labor that never came home  with us.

We sold the word citizen

and replaced it with consumer

because it sounded lighter in the mouth

and didn’t require responsibility.

 

We sold the idea of common good

for convenience,

then blamed the poor for not affording it.

 

We sold prisons as solutions,

schools as problems,

and called suffering a personal failure

to keep the balance sheet clean.

 

We sold safety by the headline.

Fear by the cycle.

Outrage by the click.

 

We sold bodies in uniform

to contracts we never read,

sent them back folded into flags,

and called it honor instead of accounting.

 

We sold children their future in installments—

test scores,

debt,

a climate that won’t wait for them to graduate.

 

We sold truth to the highest bidder

and labeled dissent ungrateful

so no one would ask for a receipt.

 

We sold faith as branding,

justice as a slogan,

and mercy as a weakness

that doesn’t poll well.

 

Now the windows are boarded with algorithms.

The town hall answers to donors.

The price keeps rising

because scarcity is profitable.

 

And still we ask

how this happened,

as if the gavel didn’t fall

every time we chose silence

over inconvenience.

 

This is the United States for sale.

No returns.

No warranty.

Sold as-is.

 

But somewhere—

under the paperwork,

beneath the noise—

there are hands refusing the transaction,

voices that haven’t signed,

people still saying we

without calculating the cost.

 

They are not loud.

They are not sponsored.

But they are not for sale.