The United States of America is Dying

What does it take to end the Great American experiment?

Well, this, for a start. What's happening now, all of it.

And before you jump up and ask to speak to a manager, sit down Karen. Or Steve. Or whatever your name is, because this one goes out to all of you.

Look around. Just for a second let go of whatever fucking political hobby-horse you are riding and take a look around at the smoking ruins you are living in.

Take off the blindfold you have been given by religion, and class, and political party, and who knows what else, and for the sake of your life, LOOK at the reality.

These are facts. You can look them up on both left and right wing sites. You can find them in books and magazines and online. These are facts. No one is arguing that there are not more facts than these, but these are REAL.

1. The average employee "needs to work more than a month to earn what the CEO earns in one hour."
2. Eight rich people, six of them Americans, own as much combined wealth as half the human race.
3. The distribution of wealth in the United States now more closely resembles the situation in Russia and China than in other advanced democracies such as the United Kingdom and France.
4. The richest 0.00025 percent of the American population now owns more wealth than the 150 million adults in the bottom 60 percent

In case you are wondering, you are not in the top 1% in the US. And no, you probably don't know anyone personally in that group.

They get richer every year under the current government policies and tax breaks. They aren't "the boss" who drives a nicer car than you and shakes your hand on Family Day at the office.

They can buy small countries. They literally wouldn't notice or be impacted in any real way by 10 million dollars suddenly missing from their accounts. Your life is very different from theirs.

Listen, people whose skin isn't the same color as yours aren't the problem. The problem is that as long as poor and middle class people refuse to work together and unionize together because of race, the rich get richer and the wealth imbalance gets worse.

But moving on.

               5. US students are 38th out of 71 countries in Math
               6. They are 24th in Science
               7. The US is 27th in the world in education and healthcare

US News and World Report released a 2018 report on the "10 Best Countries to Rise Children In"
(which are also coincidentally the best countries for: education, quality of life, women, most modern, most business-friendly, headquartering a corporation, transparency, and green living).

We didn't make the cut.

Not in any of those areas.

As of 2018, the US Healthcare system ranked worst in the developed world. It's ratings have now fallen further.

We also have the worst maternal death rate in the developed world.

We are the only advanced economy which does not guarantee workers paid vacations; when we do offer vacations, we offer less than every other developed economy except Japan.

Our sick days and maternal/paternal leave days are on the very bottom of the heap too.

18% of American children live in poverty.
27% of children have parents without secure employment.

There were 323 mass shootings in the US last year, with 387 people killed and 1274 people shot.

Three of those mass shootings were at schools.

By 2016, death by gunshot was the second-highest cause of death in the United States among children and adolescents ages 1 to 19, according to a study released in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"The United States now leads the world in the rate of firearm deaths in youth (among countries with recorded data). The rate in the US was 36.5 times higher than in a dozen comparable high-income countries around the world; the rate of firearm deaths was five times as high compared with a sampling of low-to middle-income countries." (CNN)

We are not the hero to the world.

The lamp beside the golden door has gone out and we are holding children in cages on our borders.Inside our country we hold black and brown people in for-profit cages and we call them prisons

We are living in the left-overs of the rich, who take 99 portions out of 100 and then tell us that the problem is that the people of color, or the LGBTQ+ people, or the handicapped people, or the old people, or the undocumented people, or the young people, or the indigenous people, or the whoelsehaveyougot people have taken 0.02% of our 1 portion and so they are the problem.

They are not the problem.

We have sold our souls for cowboy hats and guns.

I admit we win on freedom units. Here you have the perfect, heart-breaking freedom to own all of the guns you want. You can own all of the knives you want. You can go out and buy a tank if you are so minded.

You do not have the right to housing or food, healthcare, meaningful education, transportation, childcare, mental health services, reproductive services, clean water, or feminine hygiene products, but boy oh boy can you shoot stuff.

Awesome.

America is dying, and it won't be guns or military force which stop Her fall.

It will be solidarity. It will be poor and middle class people of all colors, orientations, identities, and physical abilities working together to break the stranglehold of privilege for the ultra-wealthy and the mega-corporations. It will be humans recognizing that unless we learn to begin together we are all going to end together.

The hour is "a minute till too late" and the time is now. Give birth to revolution, or begin to dig a grave.