[Y]oung Writers Project, an independent nonprofit based in Burlington, engages young people to write and use digital media to express themselves with clarity and power, and to gain confidence and skills for school, the workplace and life.
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Each week, VTDigger features a writing submission – an essay, poem, fiction or nonfiction – accompanied by a photo or illustration from Young Writers Project.
YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in newspapers across Vermont, on Vermont Public Radio and in YWP’s monthly digital magazine, The Voice. Since 2006, it has offered young people a place to write, share their photos, art, audio and video, and to explore and connect online at youngwritersproject.org. For more information, please contact Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org.
Narges Anzali, 12, of Weybridge, writes about her dismay with her country, from the president’s bragging about sexual assault to white supremacist rallies. She read this piece at Young Writers Project’s Celebration of Writing on Nov. 11 at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier.
Real Americans
By Narges Anzali
[C]alling all the Real Americans!
Calling all the Real Americans!
Where are you?
Where are you?
Have you disappeared beneath
the waves of violence and oppression,
sneering and discriminating with the
others just to blend in?
Calling all the Real Americans!
Calling all the Real Americans!
Have you all run away to
some country where prejudice and
hate is not rampant, and people
do not die every day for what they believe in?
Calling all the Real Americans!
Calling all the Real Americans!
Have you hidden and cowered from
a president that brags about sexual
assault and then passes it off as
“Locker room talk”? I do not know
what goes on in the boys’ bathroom,
but I am sure that is not it.
Calling all the Real Americans!
Calling all the Real Americans!
Are you diminished by your neighbors,
attacked by an onslaught of criticism
in this new America, just for
not being racist?
Calling all the Real Americans!
Calling all the Real Americans!
Have you lost all your values?
Or are they gone, washed up,
along with all pretenses of love and respect?
Calling all the Real Americans!
Calling all the Real Americans!
Are you hiding in the forests that
don’t exist anymore because they
have been cut down by the same people
who say climate change doesn’t exist?
Calling all the Real Americans!
Calling all the Real Americans!
Are you marching at the “White Lives Matter”
movements, too afraid of being called out
by your friends and neighbors?
Or maybe this is who you were all along
and I just didn’t see it?
Calling all the Real Americans!
Calling all the Real Americans!
Are you harassing some poor girl
in the street because her dress
is short and she was “asking for it”?
Calling all the Real Americans!
Calling all the Real Americans!
I’m calling for the old Americans
in the New America.
