Remove the ai budget and funnel that money into the quality of life and services offered to our service members. We don't need the 'convenience' of ai functions to begin with, but the funding that is allotted to the advancement of military ai and its assimilation into weaponry is unnecessarily high.

Our service members deserve stable, safe accommodations and easy access to benefits and support funded by the government that employs them. $7.5 billion is not an adequate sum when we have $130 billion to spend on our military.

A rough 5% of the houseless population in the United States are veterans. A 2010 study showed that an average of 22 veterans take their own life every day, and while that number is dropping every year, that is an outrageous statistic. Both are.

Often, recruitment officers visit public high schools to appeal to students coming up on graduation. When these service members then end their contract with no job experience outside of their job in the military, they are thrust into a society with no expectations as to what the job market is like.

Our military is volunteer reliant and our service members deserve to be equipped with the knowledge of how to move forward after and durring their contract allotment. Veterans affairs are lacking and residential buildings that service members live in need attention.

Education grants and veteran benefits programs are not automatically available and representatives are not required to reach out. Service members must come to them despite needing to begin streamlining benefits coordination months before outprocessing to reap adequate assistance.

Service members who live in the provided residential buildings have unnecessarily long wait times on basic service requests and often the infrastructure of these buildings date back decades on many bases across the country.

$5mil and a plot of uninhabited land over 900 miles away is an act of grand theft that the United States president has decided should be glossed over and replaced with a celebration of the invasion of North America.

Classic United States, celebrating a criminal in the name of blind patriotism.

Yes, there was money. Yes, there was land. Those are two of the many, many conditions laid out in the treaty, yet those are the only aspects that were truly fulfilled as outlined, and they didn't even exchange the money until after the indigenous people arrived in Oklahoma.

The federal government did not follow through on their treaty guidelines. They knew what they were doing by implementing their heinous removal of indigenous people from land that indigenous people built up, reaping the benefits and giving suffering and death in return.

What was advertised as a relocation was actually manipulation. The federal government promised wagons and boats for comfortable travel, a physician for every detachment with sufficient medicine, funding for new facilities, and supplies for the journey through a legally binding treaty.

How long was the Trail of Tears? The average distance a single indigenous person walked was about 950 miles from one of the three emigration depots in either Tennessee or Alabama to modern-day Oklahoma. These people walked. Walked. 950 miles. The escort took an estimated 5 months to complete.

Wagons were promised to make the travel comfortable but were used primarily to haul supplies that would be strictly rationed and often not enough. Burial sites were left unmarked. Holding facilities were overcrowded and led to widespread disease outbreaks. Most people walked the distance.

We say 'by force', but what does that really mean? In this case, armed soldiers (both federal and state militia) raided homes, pillaged communities, and rounded up indigenous people in droves. There were only three emigration depots to hold the entirety of the Cherokee nation. (Remember, 17,000.)

The Treaty of New Echota outlined the guidelines with a mere twenty tribal representatives for the entirety of the Cherokee population east of the Mississippi River. An estimated 17,000 Cherokee people were relocated, 15,000 of which were by force. This number only accounts for Cherokee people.

I choose to celebrate the culture and people that the United States has been ashamed of since the beginning and has made move after move to erase from our country's history. Indigenous people will persist, as we have always done. Our resilience lives on in the celebration of Indigenous Peoples Day.

With the reinstatement of Columbus Day as a nationally recognized holiday, some may assume that Indigenous Peoples Day has been eradicated. However, the statement that was put out by Donald Trump on the White House website does not specify the replacement of Indigenous Peoples Day.

Wild work. Very low capacity for sympathy, and I am, in fact, shocked and appalled.

For real, imagine waking up on election day and having a rough time deciding if I should still vote per my morals or per the love I feel for this person in my life who told me that if I vote per my morals, I am voting for the policies that will restrict their rights and autonomy and choosing morals.