It’s the oddest thing. The entire country is in an abusive relationship. At the minimum, people are being psychologically tortured with chaos, gaslighted and lied to. At the worst, they are being killed, beaten, violated, falsely imprisoned and terrorized. If you went to your therapist and complained about an abusive relationship like this, you wouldn’t be offered methods of compartmentalizing your suffering. No one would entertain a strategy whereby you might keep living in this situation. The only advice would be to leave the relationship. But millions of therapists are probably fielding the same quandary right now, all while being deeply entrenched in it themselves. It’s safe to assert that this has never happened before.
The immediate effects of this fascist regime of the criminal elite are far from superficial, but they don’t grab headlines. While comparatively few people are being killed compared to the entire US population, very few have remained unaffected by the overarching sadness, hopelessness, depression and anguish that has gutted our everyday lives. We continue the grind because we have no choice, but many of us have taken on that 500 yard stare of numbness, trying to remember what life used to be like. The cold truth is that the human psyche was not designed to be informed of what the most despicable human on the planet is doing every fifteen minutes. We’re paying a terrible price. Health is suffering. Physical manifestations of anxiety are pervasive. People are showing up with ailments they don’t even understand, because many are experiencing an illness of the soul for the first time.
If anything is certain during these terrible times, it’s that the veil has dropped. The exploitation of the American lie is now completely out in the open. The United States is not the good guy. It’s unabashedly the villain now. In a country full of good people, this is an existential crisis of a depth and scale for which none of us was ever truly prepared. I can’t understand how anyone ever could have voted for a genetic mutation who amounts to Biff Tannen attempting to behave like Lex Luthor. The people who allowed that to happen must bear the burden of their hate, prejudice and inability to think for themselves. They owe a debt to all of us that can never be repaid. It’s right that they suffer. They are not worthy of our forgiveness. For though we were not prepared for this uniquely American crisis, we were not insulated from the concepts of secret police, eternal vigilance in service of democracy or even selfishness. Some of what we learned in kindergarten could have prevented this. The hicks were just too stupid. The rich were just too depraved. The rest were just too few.
I don’t know if we’re over or not. The naivete has taken a much-needed hit. It only took a couple of hundred years. As we stand silent beside the inferno of our unceremonious decline, I present a couple of points for contemplation that may prove germane if we ever get another shot at this.
- Politicians are not saviors or heroes. There is no such thing as a savior or hero. No one person has the answer. No one will ever turn anything around without a lot of help. Your civic duty doesn’t end after election day. If you ever stop actively setting the rules, you’re complicit in your own exploitation.
- What’s bad for some Americans is bad for all Americans. Your country, which includes you, cannot be strong if its people are sick, afraid, dead, broke or desperate. If any of these conditions seem a reasonable compromise to get what you want, you’re objectively wrong. You likely have been irreparably manipulated into reinforcing a deliberate attempt to divide Americans so that they stay vulnerable. You have just been tricked into believing that you’re on the winning side. You’re not. There isn’t one.
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