Dear Diary,
What is the end goal? I simply don’t understand why we’re in our current position. I don’t comprehend how people can not only tolerate decades of decline but cheer and try to accelerate the process along. When I was growing up, I was fed the ‘America is the Greatest Nation’ line like everyone else. However, it was like a guided tour, and you’re specifically not supposed to see or deliberately ignore the parts that counter that narrative. I am so weary of living in a place wherein the people who declare a conclusion first and work backward from it dictate so much of life.
It is fatiguing watching the wealthy and the existing power structure ensure they remain as they are. The ‘Greatest Nation’ has done a fantastic job in its divide-and-conquer operation of its citizens, ensuring people are mostly trapped on proverbial hamster wheels and incapable of challenging the powers-that-be in any real way. Our ‘rights’ if we can call them that gets chipped away at each crisis opportunity under the pretense of something unrelated, such as the removal of encryption protection and privacy under the guise of law enforcement protections. Our education and health care systems continue to be available only for those few able to afford them, and many of those same few shrugs in apathy at the generational debt being shouldered by those trying to graduate and navigate medical bankruptcy.
Here in the ‘Greatest Nation,’ we still openly allow racism, sexism, and bigotry of many kinds to flow out of national media sources of myriad types. The hungry audience consuming this small-minded hatred becomes further radicalized, and our hopes of improving our quality of life dim ever darker. What is the end goal? Is the end goal to ensure we can never have another civil rights era protest movement? Were the displeasure of Vietnam, the hippies, and The Million Man March too much for people to handle? Young people today don’t have the freedom to protest like people did in those days, and it’s by design. One can’t merely work a summer job and pay their way through school anymore. Additionally, unions have been dismantled, and they’re coming for the post office. Wages were decoupled from productivity decades ago, and it shows.
Increasing numbers of people work multiple part-time jobs because if they got full-time hours, they would get benefits, and we can’t have that – note the sarcasm. A national health care system, akin to the rest of the developed world, would remove the burden of having employer-based health care. This freedom removes the hostage situation we are in now of some people being trapped because if they leave, they lose coverage and other people not being given coverage in the first place. People would be healthier. Again, we can’t have that.
Imagine a healthier, happier, smarter U.S.A. We could visit our families more, pursue our hobbies more and perhaps convert some of them into businesses and maybe rethink what American society should be. A healthier, happier, smarter U.S.A also could pose a significant threat to the existing powers-that-be, and they know it. The American story is filled with ‘success in spite of’ stories. America is all about overcoming odds, persistence, and accomplishing things statistically unlikely.
It is better for them to keep us sick, broke, and distracted. Horse and Sparrow Economics (a.k.a. Trickle Down, Voodoo Economics, and Reaganomics) works well when you’re the horse. You get to keep eating and walking along; you pay little mind to the sparrows picking through the droppings you leave behind. Give the sparrows their ‘bread and circuses,’ their meager sustenance, and lots of distractions, and you can continue being a bad-faith actor. We have so many bad-faith actors now, they’ve converted a lot of good-faith but ignorant citizens to do their work for them. Depending on the level of radicalization, it can be hard to tell them apart, who is scared and angry versus who is malicious? Why should the ‘Greatest Nation’ have so many people who are either, let alone both?
What is the end goal? When none of us can vote, we never stop making them money, and we barely have any existence outside of our productivity? For some people, that is life already. For minorities who have been purged from the rolls, for citizens who made a mistake but fulfilled their rehabilitative obligation to society, for citizens all across the south and midwest who get their polling places taken away, and more, voting is made difficult on purpose. Citizens can’t get time off of work, that day is not a holiday, and mail-in voting is being resisted fiercely. One side has openly admitted, for years, they don’t want people to vote because turnout hurts them. The ‘Greatest Nation’ specifically represses democracy, the one thing they supposedly love so much.
I don’t think Love is an emotion as much as it is a decision. We were taught to love our country from day one. Well, why? The answer is because we’re the ‘Greatest Nation’ on Earth. People can point to our economy, our athletic or scientific achievements, our entertainment industry, and some other things and say ‘look at all the things we do well.’ I think, again, that’s the guided tour effect. The success stories and manufactured consent that you get from seeing the best give you a false picture of what we are, or rather, you get the unfortunate chasm feeling in your chest of realization between what we could be versus where most of us are.
People decide to love the U.S.A. because they were born here, or they see those success stories, and they aspire to emulate them. What about the majority of the country without the spotlight shown on it? The crippling rural poverty, systemic racism, and sexism, xenophobia, the protection of the class structure, etc. We are told every day that at any time we can be anything we want. Well, can we be a people who aren’t mostly living paycheck to paycheck? Can we be a people who aren’t choosing to avoid ambulances or asking doctors what network they are in while we are laying on a hospital bed for financial reasons? Can we not be burdened with years of debt from accumulating the credentials required to get a job? Can we have people in leadership who form a conclusion from objective reality, as opposed to declaring a conclusion first and trying to justify it post-factum? Can we have more people willing to admit they were wrong? I’ll go first; I’m wrong all the time. I am a vastly imperfect being who makes mistakes daily, and I spend a lot of time trying to learn and be better.
If the U.S.A. is a car and the body is rusty, the wheels are missing, the axels are up on cinder blocks, the windshield is cracked in several places, the trunk doesn’t quite close right, the muffler is broken and needs replacing, but the engine is big and shiny, do you look at the car, the country, as a whole and be proud of what you have? It’s nice to measure something by what the max potential can be, but I think we should spend more time focusing on what the minimum acceptable standard should be. Let’s raise the garage floor out of the dirt instead of pushing the ceiling out of reach. However, that’s not as immediately profitable for the powers-that-be. That doesn’t look as good for their quarterly charts. That threatens their structure. Won’t anyone think of the poor hedge-fund managers and others with golden parachutes strapped to their backs?
I’ve long said a chain is only good as its weakest link. Those comfortable above the garage ceiling try to convince us we need them, but when push comes to shove, it is the long chain on the floor that makes things happen. What happens when the links in the chain are so worn they start to break? When the chain itself collapses and falls in a pile on the floor? What happens when the money stops being sucked upwards because there isn’t much left to take? We already live in a world wherein a select few hold trillions of offshore assets while the many scrambles to try to reassure their children it’s going to be ok. I can only imagine the dread those who understand the dangers of climate change feel at night when they watch in hopeless anguish as another denial report hits the news. What’s the end goal?
It’s challenging to be battered with bad news day in and day out for years on end. It’s frustrating not to give in and just adopt a ‘throw it on the pile’ sort of mentality. Good people are fighting the good fight, despite the constant setbacks and stonewalling. I take heart knowing most of what got us here is deeply unpopular and it often takes illegal, or at least clearly corrupt and unethical, activity to maintain it. It is said sunlight is the best disinfectant, and the light is spreading across what was previously a ‘good ol’ boys’ club of unacceptable behaviors that lead us here.
What’s the end goal? For them, it is never to allow the growing consciousness in The U.S.A. to overthrow the status quo. For us, it is to reclaim our country from all the things that are intolerable, embarrassing, and have already left dark stains on the history books. Nations have fallen and have risen again. We are not who we once were. If we want to claim to be the ‘Greatest Nation’ unironically, we have a lot of work to do. If we’re going to decide to love our country again, not just pretend to save face and not only the guided tour parts of it, then we have a lot of work to do. However, it is worth repeating the battles are worth the war.
~Monk Anchorwind | 12 April 2020
Note: ‘Dear Diary’ entries are written in one-shot. No real prior planning, just an emotional expression. They take shape as they’re being written. Previous thoughts aren’t deleted for brevity, etc.