Our Nation is Secretly a Third World War Zone
You’re too tired and stressed to care about what’s happening in the news and that’s a problem we must fix. Your news fatigue is what the current administration exploits most.
My article is not about this particular tragedy. While it is worth noticing and I recommend you read about it, none of my local news services followed it. The fact none of them did speaks to the real problematic nature of our current administration. When you are done reading about this, come back and answer a question with me:
Done? Horrible, isn’t it? The fear now sweeping our cities. The kind of fear no one should have to endure. Well, buckle up. It’s about to get a whole lot worse. You’ve just been too tired to notice.
When did we decide our government should wage wholesale economic warfare on our cities?
When did the president become a position so petty, it would use its power to harass the citizens through fear, through economic skulduggery, to enable its leadership to arbitrarily change laws which actively harm the residents of this nation?
Jeff Sessions brings back policies which disenfranchise anyone who is stopped by a policeman with the threat of taking their money, no crime committed, no questions, asked and with no history of ever returning any money taken. How is this legal? Why is this still legal? Why did he revert laws which were meant to prevent this from happening back to allowing it again?
Okay, wait. I do understand how this nation was founded. It was founded on murder. The Native Americans were misled, misused, made treaties with and those same treaties were broken again and again, eventually leading to murder and incarceration of said Natives on their own soil, in the worst parts of the country.
I am not confused about this.
And yes, I do understand the same supposedly forward-thinking proto-American leaders would craft legislation which would espouse great thoughts about liberty and truth and justice which would become the backbone of this great nation, in theory, whilst they still dehumanized and held African enslaved people in thrall for over two hundred years, even while promoting and preaching peace and tolerance for THEMSELVES.
Okay, so let’s assume the fundamental ideals were sound. Let’s assume if we were to put the murder and slavery and two hundred and fifty years of general racial and cultural fuckery aside and just look at the heart of the ideals of the American populace, and say that the misguided horror of the founding motherfuckers of this nation were GOOD.
How is it we still have people willing to create ICE? People willing to empower ICE to actively hunt down and harass now to death, immigrants who want the same thing for themselves the first Whites settlers gained, albeit through misdeeds, misinformation and more than the occasional murder, the right to settle in a land and maybe live a little higher on the food chain.
To do good work. To take care of their family, same as the now Usurpers of these two continents have. To have the option to be happy, raise children, hopefully to have them have a better quality of life in the nation which actively invited them to come here, that sad “wretched refuse” seeking a better life, which America claims to have, as long as you don’t scratch the veneer too closely…
If you did, you might discover:
Racial disharmony funded by the government, a government whose programs actively discriminate against people of color in house, in healthcare, in education, in finance, in opportunities given and lives taken.
Whether those lives are destroyed generationally by living on a superfund sites or being forced to drink toxic water year after year, or whether it be through poor prenatal care resulting in significant deaths in minority communities rivaling those in Third World Nations.
Or perhaps through the unrestricted growth of a more militarized police force, armed with military weapons fighting crime in a more military fashion, coupled with unchecked police powers and unaccountable police brutality.
But those citizens who escape summary judgment on the streets, face a jurisprudence designed to feed an industry; a prison-industrial complex fed by increased police presence in poor, often urban, minority-population schools where people of color are disproportionally singled out, harassed, stressed, and driven mad by the challenges of their impoverished existences.
These children are fast-tracked from school into the justice system where strikes against minorities are garnered in high school to prepare them to be imprisoned and held with longer sentences often for lesser offenses. If they aren’t killed on the street during their arrest, of course.
Offenses which, in the White majority, rule-making, economically-enhanced culture are overlooked and forgiven in order to allow them to “carry on with higher qualities of life without the problematic stigma of prison on their lives.”
Such things aren’t even a consideration if you are a minority.
Don’t get me wrong. I do understand how things are done. Look at how they have done Puerto Rico. Not a state, kept in debt, unable to benefit from American leadership, exploited by businesses, citizens but not citizens, and after Hurricane Maria they are still trying to recover from the lackadaisical, slap-dash excuse of economic support from a government which boasts of economic prosperity, as long as you aren’t brown.
The same way Paul Ryan who has spent fifteen years in Congress, stealing from citizens their rights to pensions, to unions, to healthcare, to anything he might deem an entitlement, anything which might make their later years more comfortable, their hard-working golden years more bearable, to not so ironically “retire” at the age of fifty with a guaranteed pension of $80,000 a year, golden parachute healthcare, and the opportunity to be NOT working at 50.
Or Paul Ryan has the luxury to become a lobbyist and help others defraud the government for millions of dollars per year (because that is where most government officials end up, just so you know), while you work your fingers to the bone in your three dead-end jobs with no health insurance, unable to draw your social security “entitlement” because people like Ryan are working hard to make sure you can’t, if they had their way, until you are in your seventies.
Not that you will live that long.
Given the state of healthcare in America you would be lucky to be able to afford the medical care necessary to get you to your seventies.
Only the richest and often Whitest can afford it, and even they blanche at the cost. An MRI which might actually only cost $300 in services and time will cost $13,000 because an overpriced healthcare provider can bilk the system for an additional $12,000 from a mysterious fund covered by taxpayers and essentially going from your pockets to some senior executive who cannot justify his salary but is going to be paid tens of millions every year for no reason anyone has ever manage to justify, beyond the mysterious word “because.”
But don’t worry. Because, there will be more deaths caused by ICE. More children will become orphans. More families will be broken up with parents deported, children left behind, emotionally scarred. Citizens who used to provide services will be sent to nations they have never known.
Our youngest, best and brightest, some of the nation’s hardest working students are being squeezed out of college by overpricing in Arizona, a polite “fuck you” to DACA students.
Our shortsighted government will watch the price of food increase since there is no one to pick it. No. I am not advocating for creating a slave class of workers. I am advocating for the idea we need to correct this particular problem with responsible laws for allowing people to work AND be paid fairly their status not being held against them, but treated as if they were an asset. The cheap food Americans enjoy comes at a cost in how laborers are mistreated.
You will see that cost very soon in your local markets, for the foreseeable future. But we are winning the war against illegal immigration and its the only thing that matters. With your wallet getting thinner every day, the last thing you need to be increasing is something you can’t live without: food. Yet, this will be reality perhaps from now on thanks to our national intolerance, stoked by the fears of Whites in power, in leadership and often unable to tell who has been buttering their bread for over fifty years.
Underpaid, overworked, exploited minority labor. You’re welcome.
This administration of unmonitored political criminals and ne’er do wells, watch the cost of resources increase as we engage in unnecessary trade wars to balance deficits which didn’t really exist except in the mind of a man whose business acumen included sending cheap steaks through the mail and expecting people to be happy with them, suing people who refuses to leave when he doesn’t pay them and paying off lawsuits when he doesn’t provide the services he’s promised. Winning!
A man who has defrauded almost everyone he has ever worked with, and couldn’t get a good recommendation from a single company who didn’t think he would hurt them more with a lawsuit. Still winning!
The same man whose lawyers would rather die than defend him in court and currently is leading a government so corrupt, Third World demagogues and tyrants stare in complete awe at the things he is getting away with.
A man who venerates corrupt dictators while doing everything in his power to appear to be just as pitiful as these dictators.
A man who has decided he will go to war to hide his shame. Who will spend money on military parades rather than the veterans who return home from his wars, broken, battered, and scarred by their patriotism.
A man whose position appears more and more to have been bolstered by disreputable organizations with foreign funding (NRA), and using technology (social media) they have upset a delicate balance of a world poised on the edge of an economic, ecologic, and financial razor.
Yeah. I have barely scratched the surface of this goddamn nightmare, right? Not to worry. I will let you escape this by pretending it doesn’t matter.
I will let you escape this by allowing you to breathe in the redolence which is the administrations belief that it is the best administration this nation has ever held.
Decisions made by this administration are being made by the best people for the job, even if they have been lobbyists fighting against the very positions they now hold. (Pruitt vs the EPA)
Even if they are doctors in charge of housing creating even more draconian protocols to get housing instead of making it easier and better and more affordable to find a place to live in a nation growing more cruel, hostile and damaging to those without work, opportunities or hope.
An administration which has decided we should revert to using coal and oil to power our society, no matter how much air pollution gets made, no matter how many lives are lost mining coal, no matter how many rivers are choked to death on coal ash, the coal industry MUST go on. Instead of subsidizing solar energy, we are taxing it, boycotting it or refusing to even acknowledge it’s existence in the year 2018, while entire nations talk of their solar capacity and increase it every year.
Because we wouldn’t want to use up the sun, after all?
An administration so pathetic and stupid, it is hard to find a place where they aren’t engaged in cronyism, nepotism, while playing lip-service to egalitarianism, during their commission in the public eye of any number of criminal activities; buffered only by the complete failure of the news media, those which are not already in their pockets, to reveal to a public too overwhelmed with their daily struggle for survival to recognize, just how incompetent our current administration truly is.
Yep. You can just pretend everything is going according to plan. White people are getting richer by the second, skimming wealth off the top, gambling it on the Dow Jones, stagnating wages, killing unions, keeping the right to work meaning exactly the opposite of what it says, paying people as little as they can figure out how to live on, raising the cost of childcare, raising the interests and fees you have to pay, raising your rents, while lowering the ways you can find to make a decent living.
The wealthiest 1 percent of American households own 40 percent of the country’s wealth, according to a new paper by economist Edward N. Wolff. That share is higher than it has been at any point since at least 1962, according to Wolff’s data, which comes from the federal Survey of Consumer Finances.
From 2013, the share of wealth owned by the 1 percent shot up by nearly three percentage points. Wealth owned by the bottom 90 percent, meanwhile, fell over the same period. Today, the top 1 percent of households own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. That gap, between the ultrawealthy and everyone else, has only become wider in the past several decades.
Because if you made a decent living, if you came home rested after only one job, if you made time to take care of yourself and your family, if you weren’t so stressed out you could hear yourself think, you would recognize why an immigrant family killed being chased by ICE agents should horrify you to no end.
That Americans are hunting down other Americans on the streets of a nation supposedly directed by our Constitution toward the equality and freedom of our citizens and citizens to be, would be an egregious thing.
That there are police who will over the course of this year kill over two thousand people, of which one third will be unarmed and their deaths will result in no censure, no accountability and a nice two week vacation for the officers in question, should enrage you.
The state of the nation as you would know it, if you were rested would have you out in the streets, blocking them. Costing corporations billions as their workers arrive late, their resources arrive late, their salaries and stock market gambling failing to pay off, until they could no longer ignore you.
But you are too tired. And there are simply too many criminals acting as governors, politicians, Congressmen and the criminalization of government too ubiquitous for you to pay attention to, all things considered.
So, go home. Get some rest. You have a third shift to get to and you only have two hours before then.
By the time you get off work tonight, we will be at war. We will be bombing some nation of brown people into non-existence for fun and profit. Or some other scandal you won’t have time for.
Don’t worry about it. We’re America. We believe in freedom enough to kill everyone anywhere, including right here in the US of A. We’ve been doing it for centuries.
Don’t cross the US government. We’re disorganized. Crooked. Murderous. Disreputable. And in charge of the most powerful military on the planet.
God Bless America. And no place else.
Scared yet? You will be.
Thaddeus Howze is a writer, essayist, author and professional storyteller for mysterious beings who exist in non-Euclidean realms beyond our understanding.
As a prolific writer of speculative fiction, scientific, technical and cultural commentary from his office in Hayward, California, Thaddeus’ speculative fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals. He has published two books, ‘Hayward’s Reach’ (2011), a collection of short stories and ‘Broken Glass’ (2013) an urban fantasy novella starring his favorite paranormal investigator, Clifford Engram.
Thaddeus works as a writer and editor for two magazines, the Good Men Project, a social men’s magazine as well as for Krypton Radio, a sci-fi enthusiast media station and website. He is also a freelance journalist for Polygon.com and Panel & Frame magazine. Thaddeus is the co-founder of Futura Science Fiction Magazine and one of the founding members of the Afrosurreal Writers Workshop in Oakland.
