American Nightmare

Riots.
Dead.
Cities on fire.
Statues toppling.
Lack of government oversight.
Deregulation.
No respect.
Loss of control.

Just another day in the American nightmare.

How long has our society been a total dystopia? Apparently a long time - most of my life, I suspect. I couldn't tell you when it began. Perhaps it started the moment Europeans set foot on the continent, bringing with them smallpox and death to the Native Americans who lived here.

Dystopian literature has long been a favorite genre of mine. These stories are about the ends of societies. People know them by their names in books and movies - Mad Max, The Hunger Games, Brave New World, The Handmaid's Tale, 1984, The Giver, etc. Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank, was one of the first dystopian novels I fell in love with. The story, about survival on the Florida coast after nuclear demise created by unrest in the Middle East, felt real and possible to me then, way back in 1980 when we were dealing with the hostage crisis at the end of Jimmy Carter's presidency.

Walter Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz, which dealt with aftermath of the collapse of current civilization and went through until it collapsed again, also made quite an impression in my younger years.

And here we are in America, living lives of suffering, watching death and economic collapse occur on what is truly an epic scale.

We are now living in The Hunger Games and Animal Farm, and in most of those imaginary worlds. Don't believe me? I can take you to the coalfields right now and show you District 12 from The Hunger Games. Look at Congress, see the pigs we have for leaders, right up to the chief boar, biggest pig of them all, who has his followers believing with every breath that some are more equal than others. Such a total twisting of truths, the bald-faced lies of "fake news," is so 1984ish it is as if I fell into the book.

We are the only nation in this world - this great big planet - with deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic on a massive scale. With no leadership to speak of, with a government completely undermined and dislodged from reality, did we really think we'd find solace and comfort from the enemies within? We have only ourselves to blame for our stolid independence, our devout fortitude, our utter dismal faith that God will keep us, even as we are too stupid to use the minds He gave us to better our own lot.

Instead, we vote in the fools and let the inmates run the asylum.

American Nightmare.

We're the only nation, too, with multiple school shootings. We're the only nation who willingly eats our young in order to maintain our "freedoms" to hold a rifle, and now, I suppose, our "freedom" to not wear a mask and to spread a deadly disease. We'll allow this virus to run rampant amongst our children, letting it chew on their hearts and lungs, before we step back and see if we can do something different.

Will we have the children social distance while they're doing shooter drills every couple of weeks? How is that going to work out, I wonder.

We are trapped. We are caught with a leadership that is negligent, indifferent, irresponsible, and crazy. A leadership that at one moment incites people to violence (LIBERATE VIRGINIA) and on the other hand offers handouts to the very rich who don't need the money.  Give the people $1,200. That will shut them up. Here, big oil, millions for you. You're welcome.

We also have an intellectual class that at some point did not step in and stop this when they should have. I don't know when that was. The 1990s? Earlier? But of course they (I) said nothing. Because how dare we question the status quo, even though it is the most fucked up, evil, and ruthless system on the planet. How dare we!

So we didn't.

Look at us now. For the last 20 years, since 9/11, we have become despicable people. We have more poor, more ill, more desperate people than any other country. We also have more rich. This disparity between rich and poor was created and made worse by a ruthless class of assholes who want theirs at the expense of everyone else. As if Capitalism is a pie, and they want 7/8 of it, giving the rest over to the worthless idiots who can't figure out that the system is set against them from the moment they are born.

Pull yourself up by your bootstraps my ass. American dream. It's a fucking dream alright. It's a goddamn nightmare, is what it is.

Now we have this great divide. Us against them. Who are them? Anyone who isn't us. Skin color, hair color, jobs, political points of view. Religious fealty. But mostly we're a bunch of scared, nervous people who are suffering from terrible feelings of powerlessness, rage, hopelessness, and pessimism. Because honestly, how is this going to get any better?

These internal feelings for white people, especially white men, are, I suspect, relatively new. America has always been a dystopia for black people, for the Native Americans we so casually displaced, for most women - for anybody who stood out and was different and dared to try to actually live that fucking American dream. A few even "made it," if making it is defined by monetary success. Which in America is, after all, how we define everything. Every single damn thing in this country is defined by a dollar bill.

And because dollar bills are what matters, people do not. We do not care about one another. We don't care about anyone who isn't "us," whoever the hell that is.

This is our society today. It goes like this: 

We're the richest country in the world and about 13 million children live in food insecure homes. Over 4 million children do not have health insurance or adequate healthcare. Over 17% of our children live without basic necessities. About 5.5 million reports of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse are made annually.

And what is our response? We cut funding for school lunch programs. Right now, this very moment, the current administration is fighting to do away with the Affordable Healthcare Act, taking it before the Supreme Court in another effort to dismantle it completely. We assume that if kids have poor parents, well, tough luck. Apparently the parents don't deserve decent wages, for whatever reason. If kids are being abused, well, that's a shame, but parents have the right do raise their kids as they see fit. 

What can you do with such apathy? How do you fight this total lack of empathy and human feeling?

We could do a lot of things. We could ensure people have enough money to feed their children with a decent minimum wage. We could have regulations for clean air. We could have health care for all. We could ensure better mental health services, more counseling, better education . . . we could spend the money we spend on the fucking military on our own people instead of on more fighter jets that we don't need.

What we need to stop doing is putting little Band-Aids on big, major problems that require resolve and courage to solve. We need to step up and say, "Fuck this shit. This is enough."

Capitalism exploits us. It is a screwed up economic system that requires people to be poor so someone else can be rich. It has been going on for so long, people don't even realize that the corporations and the wealthy are exploiting them. We're nothing but a power source, a labor source, and if we're all used up, then we are totally and completely expendable.

So sure, die from a virus. If your immune system can't take it, no sweat off of their backs. There are billions of people. They might even have to take in some brown folks to fill space after the white folks all die off, but the corporations don't care. They just want the money anyway.

We have been totally dehumanized, us stupid Americans. We've divided ourselves into human and non-human. We are incapable of doing things other countries - better countries, really - have managed to do and do well. Things like healthcare, retirement, vacations, education, income. Feeling safe in your home, your grocery store, your surroundings. Basic human rights. We don't even know what a basic human right is, except for "pursuit of happiness." And what does that mean, after all, if you haven't any means to reach it?

When I was growing up, I expected to find a job, stay in it, have a good income and a retirement plan. That is all gone. Out the window, blowing in the wind, a pipe dream. My grandfather and father lived it, but he and others like him made damn sure his children didn't and wouldn't. And my niece and nephews haven't even a clue that it existed once, this small taste of security and belonging.

The only people who can walk around safely now live in gated communities with armed guards, like those folks in Margaret Atwood's Oryx & Crake, where they are safe and can be who they want to be. They don't have to worry that there are fewer and fewer jobs out there. They don't care, probably don't even know, that people are making do with less and less. (Though one day it will reach them, too. For all their money, they are not immune. Even the rich must die.)

The rest of us, we have to do for ourselves. And this goes back how far? As far as I can trace it. Racism and bigotry lies at the heart of this dystopia, because it kept us, as U.S. citizens, from becoming truly a single nation, keeping us instead as a country of "them" versus "us." Always. We never built systems to protect and help people, never put things into place to ensure the kind of social safety net that is a basic human right, because we were so busy being concerned that someone else might get "ours" when "they" shouldn't have it, that we have vaulted to the bottom of the first world nations.

We're not even a first world nation now. We're like a fifth world nation or something. Even third world nations don't have the problems we do. They don't have the failing infrastructure, the mass shootings, the total unhappiness that surrounds me every single time I go into the grocery store, when the waves of anger and frustration simply come at me as if I am in an ocean of angst.

I am drowning in that ocean, and so are you. And you. We are all drowning and fooling ourselves that the water we are allowing into our lungs is actually good for us, when in the end, it so polluted with hatred that it will destroy this country and take our children with it.

We have the greatest military. Whoopee. We did not invest in the things that mattered. We did not invest in our future as people. We have become fragile. The coronavirus has shown us for what we are - weak, secluded, scared saplings, ghosts of the people we could have been, had our world been just a little bit different, our minds just a little more open, our lives just a little less filled with hate.

When we are only commodities - and that is all we are, in the end, in a capitalistic society - how could we have expected to ultimately end up with a functioning society? We can't. Because we're too busy now living the worlds created in our dystopian literature, where we each have to protect what little we have because, well, because it's all we have.

We don't even know how to reach out to one another as human beings in an effort to make it better. We watch the protests on TV and see them turn into riots and gasp. Those others! We don't think, don't empathize, don't care.

God, what a sickening society we are. We are the zombies we have been afraid of all of this time. We don't need to look for them on TV.

They are all around us, each of us, dragging our feet, watching our lives waste away, searching for meaning in faux religions and cultish leadership, wanting to eat one another out of fear and loathing.

And now we have reached a pinnacle where fascism is here, its ugly nastiness a jackboot around the corner. We are a vote away from it. Regardless of who wins, it is here, and it isn't going to go away. We will kill one another in the end, if the virus doesn't get us all first.

We have never been a country that understands friendship. We adore ignorance. We don't want to know. We don't want to understand, improve, care, imagine a better world - damnit, we simply don't want to change. We're not friends, none of us. We're just strangers living in the same land, looking askance at one another, wondering not, "How can I help?" but "What do they want?"

Is it any surprise to anybody that now we're watching cities burn? We've got a lunatic with his finger on the nuclear codes.

And us? We are all simply bewildered and horrified.