You have to work for a living, with shitty, subhuman wages, and if you quit the job, your whole family loses your doctor and all your prescriptions.

Health care is a civil right in civilized countries, but in the USA it’s all about profits, leaving many people dead but making others millionaires.

Everything in America is monetized, and anything that doesn’t make a profit is belittled, underfunded, or eliminated. Private enterprise is worshiped; public enterprise is sneered at.

Here’s the richest country in the history of Earth, where countless people live horrendously shitty lives and thousands of us die homeless every year.

Damned near nobody gives a damn. It’s actually helpful for our overlords — having horrendous poverty always on display keeps people obedient, too frightened to even consider walking away from their job or ‘the system’.

Sure, there’s a safety net, but most of its resources and effort involve making sure nobody gets help without wallowing through oceans of bureaucracy and paperwork.

Firearms are everywhere, making every day an episode of Gunsmoke, except that when Matt Dillon was the marshal, kids were usually unarmed and not being shot dead.

Good guy cops like Dillon are only fictional, of course. Real police operate above and beyond the law, free to bully or beat anyone, with only the pretense of oversight when someone’s killed, and that ‘oversight’ is always by police, retired police, or buddies of the police.

If you survive being arrested, you’re innocent until proven guilty, but jailed while awaiting trial, and there’s noplace in America more dangerous than our county jails. Some jails have dozens of deaths every year, so it’s more accurately ‘innocent until found unresponsive in a cell’.

We pretend to be a peaceful nation, but weapons and war and military bases are America’s biggest exports.

Education is increasingly underfunded, civics is no longer taught, and what is taught is mostly indoctrination.

Higher education is only higher indoctrination, and paying those student loans will swallow most of the big-bucks income you’re hoping the degree will provide.

Religion and politics are weaponized as mass-produced hate, and America’s loudest, meanest hate comes from people claiming Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior.

Charlatans control much or most of religion and government, praising the Lord and clutching their Bibles, and funneling the profits to American oligarchs.

Most people don’t know what’s actually happening, because legacy media is owned by billionaires, with coverage tailored to the charlatans’ and billionaires’ perspective. Insipid algorithm-driven social media has replaced journalism with intentional misinformation.

Americans hold the internet in the palm of their hands, technology not one on a million of us understands, and we use it to scroll through screeds against science.

And looming above us, the climate wobbles sideways, promising hotter hots, colder colds, more and more floods, droughts, hurricanes, even earthquakes. But global warming is discussed only by eggheads and activists, while governments do almost literally nothing about it, and corporations only pile on, making things worse.

Of course, we’ve elected the dumbest, meanest, most belligerent billionaire charlatan in public life — Donald Trump — to be president of these United States. He doesn’t believe in climate change, the Constitution, or anything but money and cruelty, and he’s busily seeking out the worst possible people for key positions, ensuring there’ll be no solutions to anything, only more problems.

From all this, there’s no conclusion to be drawn except the obvious, the inarguable: America is an insane society. What a bunch of idiots we are, bragging about our silly stars and stripes, our founding fathers, our ignored Constitution, and standing in shit where there could’ve been a society.

This is far from a comprehensive list of complaints and crises. Almost the opposite; it’s a very rushed recap of just the first insanities and stupidities that came to me after a bad dream, staring into the horrid reality of being awake and aware.

Merry Christmas to this fucked-up place, America, where the happiest surprise is that sometimes there’s a day without mass murders.

12/25/2024

itsdougholland.com 
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