Dream reality
In the US we're taught that individuals need only to take care of themselves. The whole "self made boot strap" messaging that actually makes it so much harder to thrive. All the most of us get is to survive. Many can't even get that much. We see it everyday on the streets of the richest country on earth.
Throughout history families worked together to take care of the family members who can't take care of themselves. Children, the elderly and the infirm. Children were raised seeing that dynamic played out as a natural order of life.
The more isolated the individual is from familial support and responsibility, the more wealth (lifetime value) can be extracted from them to the system.
The system props up supports that lure the population to believe said system has us all covered. Over promising and under delivering to the point it all eventually collapses.
Then all the sources of support one once gave and received as a matter of familial belonging have become a subscription.
We pay for childcare and eldercare that are no substitute for the love of family. We live with less and less love in our lives. We suffer for it and then become blind to the suffering right in front of us.
Introduce a target to blame for our suffering that strategically points anywhere other than the system responsible for it. The immigrant, the queer, the impoverished, the mentally and physically infirm, the bipoc folks. Just never never never, the billionaire class.
Everything is removed, remote and reversed. Compassion becomes enabling. Cruelty becomes justice. Greed is good, ethics are inconvenient. Conservation kills. Exploitation gives the dream life we're promised if we "work hard enough".
I'm exhausted by the cognitive distortions presented to the masses on a daily basis. It screams in our faces everywhere we look. Not just in the media. At school, at work, at traffic lights, at the grocery store, at the park. Anywhere there is concrete and people, there it is.
Yesterday I spent a peaceful day so far into the middle of nowhere I had a line through the signal bars on my cellphone. I could hear nothing but wind in the trees, water falling over rocks and bird song.
The relief was so profound I cried.
I am grateful that I am "woke" enough to see the nightmare being sold as the American dream. I don't care if I get labeled a "libtard" or whatever ridiculous thing the zombies want to call me and people like me.
We are all getting the same end of the stick.
I'd rather know when I am being violated and not wake up later wondering what the hell happened. Bottom line is we're all getting f***ed.