A lot of people are wondering why nearly 70 million Americans, pretty much half, actively chose to keep the dumpster fire. I think we need to figure out where we went wrong, so maybe we could fix it. They say the truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off. As a therapist, I know that is true.
Poverty is traumatizing, and the people are suffering. They’ve lost their jobs, they’ve seen a quarter million Americans die, while the cops STILL just can’t stop killing Black Americans again, and again, and again. Most of them don’t know anything about politics other than that their vote doesn’t matter because they’re poor, which of course is 100% true. Some percentage of them think of themselves as liberal, and another, slightly larger percentage of them think of themselves as conservative. However, there’s a third, much larger percentage who perceive correctly that it’s just two different flavors of the same bullshit, brought to you by our billionaire corporate overlords.
This particular form of bullshit is also destroying the only human habitat that we know of. Mother Earth will be just fine; it’s humanity who will be dying off. And guess what? Most of the dead will be gut-wrenchingly poor, because killing off a surplus population of working people, (already demonized by popular culture) is not a bug, but a feature for Our Corporate Overlords. The death is the point. It always has been.
The children of the poor are suffering also, and the great equalizer that was supposed to be public education has entirely crumbled, from a high bar that was only ever for white kids anyway. I’m privileged, I’m white and I graduated from high school in 1987, right before the wheels came off. All the schools are broke now and teachers are retiring in droves. I work with poor kids and there is a whole generation of middle schoolers being raised by Grand Theft Auto V and Instagram. Millions of unemployed people, and their kids, stuck at home, while everybody gets angrier. They haven’t paid rent in months, they’re being expected to supervise their children’s distance learning 100%, everything that’s not on fire is falling apart, while billions of dollars are spent on all of this activity that means nothing to them, that benefits no one except the media, political science majors, future politicians, and, of course, current politicians. 99% of congress are rich as Croesus, while homeless veterans with PTSD are starving to death on the streets in the South. America is already a failed state.
Can you maybe understand why so many people are leery of the Democratic Party? After watching what happened to Gore in 2000, after seeing the ravages wrought by Clinton’s crime bill, after all of the wars and all of the school shootings and all of the dead Black bodies? This has been going on for far, far too long.
God forbid anyone brings up socialism; half of America doesn’t even know that’s literally what roads are, but they do know that socialism is evil. They have no idea it’s just the normal, practical way of governance in the rest of the civilized world. Homelessness, hunger, inescapable poverty, crushing debt, lack of healthcare, all because nothing can happen without it enriching Our Corporate Overlords. I’m not saying we have to dump capitalism completely. I know people are not really going to follow Jesus’s teaching that they sell all they have and give it to the Poor. However, it does seem as though unfettered capitalism has failed us. For three generations.
I heard that Nancy Pelosi said, “We’re capitalists. Period.” Well, I have a question: could we maybe just squeeze out a one-inch strip of socialism and apply it to the affected areas? Where the pain is the greatest? Could we dissolve the police and recruit an elite troop of determined social workers, armed with kindness and hot meals and birth control? Could we switch the defense and education budgets, just for one year, so we can fully fund terrific schools for every kid? If kids have security, maybe they won’t need white supremacy to make them feel special. Could we make sure everybody just has enough, even if someone thinks they don’t “deserve” it? We must normalize real social security, because people need to feel secure. We need freedom from fear and freedom from want.
If you haven’t read “Caste: The origins of our discontents” by Isabel Wilkerson, I recommend it highly.
