The U. S. is my country, and I love it.
Nevertheless, it is not the "one necessary nation" or the "shining city on a hill." I recognize misery when I see it. The truth is the U. S., for most of us, is a brutal place in which to live. Loneliness is at epidemic levels. People find it very difficult to have and maintain true friendships. Families are split up via corporations' work requirements, imprisonment, and deployment. Children are afraid to go to school and parents are afraid to let them go.
People work three jobs and still can't feed their families. Men are unable to fulfill the role they believe is theirs: to provide for their families not only the necessities of life but little enjoyments, too. Women who want to stay home with their kids don't necessarily want an all or nothing Sophie's choice between staying home and working outside the home. The result is widespread depression, anxiety, pills, and booze. Work, at the end of the day, for far too many people sucks the life out of them with its repetitiousness, boredom, and knowledge of being replaceable.
Look around the next time you go out. What do you see? If you look, you see farmland turned into mono-crops to enhance shareholders' bottom lines. You'll see few, if any, mom-and-pop stores or restaurants. They've been driven out by big-box stores, chain restaurants, and low-paid, low-investment workforces. Look around you! The profits don't stay with the workers or even the managers. They go to headquarters and investors' returns.
The media offer entertainment—crude entertainment; journalists are on the ropes if they are working at all. We have real difficulty separating fact from fiction, truth from lies. We know we are being manipulated, that "our consent is being manufactured" as Chompsky wrote, but we don't know what to do about it.
We believe our country values democracy when we can't even agree that every member of our country should be able to vote. Democracy is whittled away via penalties for being imprisoned, inability to get to the polls, the closing of polls, not having an address, or like me, living in a winner-take-all state where my vote is not counted.
We overthrow other countries' democracies to protect our corporatations' and their shareholders' bottom lines leaving misery in our wake.
We throw veterans out on the streets, deport others, consign millions of children to poverty while celebrating our centi-billionaires as being somehow indicative of our country's greatness rather than its ruthlessness and rigged economy.
We use language to dupe. The word "reform" is chosen because it conveys an effort at making things better when it is really about tightening the screws.
We call our endless wars bids for Freedom! Sovereignty! Democracy! We say our presidents are compassionate and decent when they use their power to make lives here and abroad more miserable than they already are. We even say that a penchant for genocide and a compassionate character go together.
Misery is our condition. The only way out is to acknowledge how messed up we are. How unhappy. How unsettled we are. How manipulated we are. How much we need one another.
And begin to believe we have more power than we are being gaslit into believing we have so little of. We can stop looking the other way. Stop thoughtlessly believing what we hear and see. Turn off mainstream media. Turn on independent journalists for independent analysis.
Love one another. Love one another meaningfully. Effectively. (I’m not talking about a sentiment.) That is the only real way out.
Thank you for reading!
Thank you, Ellin. I’m always grateful for your honesty and candid explanations. When you say “reform” is really “tightening the screws” are you referring to the current limitations within our sociopolitical system?
Dear Sister, this is it right here, echoes some of my feelings, excepting for the love of this country. You are on point here, so very on point.