If You Wanted to Destroy a Country, You’d Start With Its Kids

If You Wanted to Destroy a Country, You’d Start With Its Kids

By Tina Winterlik aka Zipolita

If you wanted to take over a country quietly—without a single bomb or bullet—what would you do?

You’d drug the kids.
You’d flood the streets with poison.
You’d let them die, slowly, publicly, painfully.
And you’d make sure no one in power stopped it.

Sound extreme?

Look around.

We are watching an entire generation slip away—one fentanyl hit at a time.
Kids, teens, young adults. Slumped on sidewalks. Disappearing from schools. Vanishing from families.

And no one is treating it like the emergency it is.

Where are the full-scale treatment centers?
Where are the emergency mental health teams?
Where is the housing, the education, the grief support for families burying their children?

Instead, we get photo ops. PR spin. Condos no one can afford. And more obituaries.

If this was a war—and let’s be honest, it is—then these are the casualties.
But no one is fighting for them.

You want to weaken a nation?
You take out its young people.
You break them with trauma, drown them in hopelessness, and leave them with no future.
You call them “unhousable” instead of human.
You blame them while doing nothing to stop the bleeding.

And you make sure the survivors are too broken, too isolated, or too poor to push back.

But here's what they didn't count on:

We see what’s happening.
We’re not all asleep.
And some of us are done being polite about it.

This isn’t a “crisis.”
It’s a form of erasure.
And if we don’t say it—bluntly, loudly, relentlessly—it will keep happening until there’s nothing left.

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📢 If you feel this in your bones, share it.
Talk to your kids.
Talk to your neighbours.
Call it what it is.
And never stop demanding better.

They’ve taken too many already.
They don’t get the rest without a fight.

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