America needs to be a safe place for anybody and everybody

Dear President Trump,

America needs to be a safe place for anybody and everybody. Many people are fleeing war-torn countries to find a safe, new life in America. They dream of living somewhere free, and they deserve that. These people have escaped traumatic, life-threatening situations, and I feel it’s our duty to open our arms to them and welcome them. America should be a place where everybody, including immigrants, members of the LGBT community, women, and people of different races, should be treated equally.

I would suggest that you read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. In it, a black man is put on trial for a crime he never committed, and is found guilty, simply for the color of his skin. In the end, he ends up dead, when he was always completely innocent in the first place. The book takes place in the late 1930s, and we tend to think that we’ve moved past these times, that nothing like that could ever happen now. There is still injustice in this world. While the characters in the book are fictional, the subject is very, very real.

The events happening in this world today have caused many young people, like myself, to have their eyes opened and be exposed to the ugly parts of this world. To Kill a Mockingbird is told through the eyes of an eight-year-old girl who navigates the world alongside her eleven-year-old brother. With their father being the lawyer of the innocent black man, the two young kids are exposed to terrible injustice.

It hits them both hard, particularly her brother. It’s clear that he’s been shocked by the injustice of the world, and has to work hard to get his faith in humans restored. He is a character who never took much interest in seeing the real world before, but now he can’t help but see what’s going on right before his eyes. Angry and hurt, he is forced to grow up right then and there. This has happened to many young people, including me, just like him. We live his storyline. We want to have a voice. We are young, but we have opened our eyes and see what’s going on in the world. We want to have our ideas heard.

The book is very much still important to today’s events. Injustice still very much exists. We ask for your help in stopping this. I ask that you please look around at the faces of all of the people here in America today, and not see black people and white people, men and women, gay people and transgender people, but just people. We are all people.

Sincerely, a concerned citizen,

Gillian C. Murray, Grade 7, Leaves of Learning, member of Oxford (Ohio) Meeting