John Wise

God damn, I’m angry about America as it appears to be swirling like a turd going down the toilet. Without a collective mind or compass, we are driven by greed propelled by fear, creating the appearance that America is on track to destroy itself. If the people of the United States were pissed enough to elect the man they did as President in 2016, the next election in 2024 is on track to deliver even worse results. My hopes that the last election would nudge us back onto a track of normal are quickly fading as my optimism’s spring runs dry.

I’ll try to tamp down the vitriol and spell out why I have such negative views of the future, though let me be clear: while I anguish over the future of the United States, I still have a favorable outlook for Caroline and me and our ability to enjoy our later years of life.

I’ve lamented time and again my disdain for the mediocrity being cultivated in the culture I’ve mostly grown up in. From my early days in Los Angeles during the 70s and my affinity for rebellion through music, film, literature, and sometimes appearance, and certainly, in my thinking, I’ve rarely relented in being critical of certain aspects of American life. Namely poor education, demands for conformity, intolerance, racism, violence, love of war, vapid celebrity worship, and love of money above all else.

The COVID pandemic slammed on the breaks, skipped the parachute, and crashed our global economy into a vast garbage patch somewhere out in the ocean. Like a plane on September 11, 2001, slamming into a high-rise, consumerism became the victim of a viral attack that is still claiming victims and only appears to grow worse in a cascade of economic terrorism.

For much of 2020 and into 2021, humanity entered stasis where things were in hibernation, maybe not on the political front as the powers to inflict intellectual harm were still hard at work, but economically, everyone worked, studied, ate, and vacationed from home who could afford to do so.

The U.S. Government and banking system immediately understood that 4 in 5 Americans would be placed in a perilous economic situation by the fallout of the pandemic and that an emergency cash infusion was needed to calm what could have become panic. On March 13, the President declared America to be in a National Emergency due to COVID-19, and then only 12 days later, the CARES Act was presented, which the President signed two days later. Rather than suffer the malaise caused by a full stop of spending and face a financial catastrophe with people defaulting en masse on rent and debt payments, the government quickly threw a multi-trillion dollar life jacket to everyone earning under about $120,000 a year. This equates to about 80% of our population that was considered at risk. See reference one below.

This $2800 per household or $1400 for individuals, along with a moratorium on evictions, allowed people to get things in order before they found themselves homeless or in default. Many people moved back home, took on roommates, started living in vehicles, or simply chose homelessness.

Two years later, businesses are clamoring to recover lost income. To that end, seemingly everyone is raising prices to offset the vast reduction in spending that occurred and has still not rebounded. This has been easily apparent just by looking at how many restaurants closed over the past couple of years, and many of the ones that were able to remain open are only seeing a fraction of pre-pandemic traffic.

As recovery started taking place, there’s been an absence of workers that have been blamed on the continuing pandemic, lucrative unemployment deals, laziness, and various other issues. The way I see it, as financial reality struck Americans and they altered consumption and lifestyles, they learned to live with less. During the height of the pandemic, many unemployed service workers turned to the gig economy in the form of food and package delivery. With recovery underway, I believe people thought these laid-off workers would run back to their $12-an-hour jobs, but they’d made too many changes to their personal lives and with the reality that their $1628 monthly take-home pay after taxes of a full-time job wasn’t going to allow them to afford the rent for a one bedroom apartment, electricity, water, trash, sewer, phone, internet, and food, which add up to a minimum expense of over $2000 a month. Of course, they could have taken on a second job as they were doing before things shut down, but now is not then.

Okay, so I’ve addressed low-income earners in those “student” jobs; let’s look at the idea of going to university.

With uncertainty about the future of jobs due to potential other pandemic shutdowns, the absurdity of going to college to incur a 10-year loan that will cost between $500 and $1000 a month for repayment only to get a job that might pay $50,000 makes for a bleak future. But I can hear people saying that $50k is a good wage; oh really? After-tax, that income is only $39k per year or $3,246 per month; now, let’s do the math. Rent for one bedroom is $1500, electricity $100, trash, water, sewer $40, health insurance contribution $140, phone and internet of $75, food for $368, student loan of only $500, transportation to this job of no less than $100 a month plus car insurance of another $60, and the fixed costs are a minimum of $2,883 per month allowing this new college grad to pocket $363 a month to pay for luxuries such as planning on having children, car repairs, saving for a house, dating, going on vacation, retirement, subscribing to Netflix, eating out, or going to the movies. I refuse to believe that $90 a week in disposable income is ever going to accomplish all that.

Inflation is out of control, with some costs such as rent not being adequately represented in the Consumer Price Index (CPI), but with rents moving towards an average of $1500 a month for a one-bedroom apartment in cities that have jobs, we will reach a breaking point where wages will not be able to keep pace with rising costs. It is as though we are operating on a theory that total annihilation must take place in order for a societal collapse to force a reimagining of how we do things. First, though, we’ll need a thorough culling of the seriously angry people who are most at risk from not being able to afford to live in this country; a civil war should propel that nicely.

We as a country cannot ask for sacrifice and investment as our rabid sense of individuality backed by incredible stupidity would never allow people to come together to create a unifying vision, which is exacerbated by the general public’s abysmal level of intellectual capacity. One does not act in one’s own best interest in America; we act precisely against that.

As we lemmings aim for the ledge, what could possibly stop us from tumbling over the side? State rights and the extremism that is currently our norm would halt a federal program to contain the price gouging. Bringing in outside workers would have us up in arms about immigration when Americans need jobs that are currently not filled. Getting people into university to allow us to add to professional jobs is a non-starter due to the costs of simultaneously paying to live in America, taking on more debt, and going to classes, not forgetting to mention that according to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below a 6th-grade level. See reference two below. Prose literacy is defined as: “The knowledge and skills needed to understand and use information from texts including editorials, news stories, brochures, and instruction manuals.” This begs the question of how over half of the population of the United States will ever be able to understand a college-level textbook.

This level of illiteracy and inability to learn complex tasks is putting America at risk of having an enormous segment of its population stuck in a dead-end where there is no economic future for them to afford the ability to live in dignity. Stop and think about this: 180 million Americans are operating at a level below a 6th grader. How is an advanced nation supposed to live in a democracy when a majority cannot reason beyond an 11-year-old?

During the past more than a year and a half, we’ve listened to the frustration of parents whose kids haven’t been attending school. They are said to worry about what the children are missing in their education, social skills, and potential for careers after not being able to attend in-person school for so long. Add the circus around supposedly teaching children Critical Race Theory (CRT), feuding about mask and vaccination mandates, and the threat of gun violence on campuses, and parents start to look at the perceived damage to their progeny through the eyes of the voter. Well, the Republicans are the ones who want those kids back in school free of masks, CRT, and vaccine mandates, and with no regard to a pandemic, guns, racism, or even questioning the effectiveness of our fractured, ill-performing excuse for an education they want things to return to something, a thing they likely can’t adequately explain.

With this, parents are admitting some ugly truths about who they are: children potentially contracting lifelong side effects from a new disease is okay, and racism has always been a component of life, so who cares about that? Plus, I don’t want my children calling me out about my own bias. Guns are a fact of life, as the 2nd amendment guarantees us, which means it’s inevitable that some kids will die; the way we live so far away from one another means our children don’t live in proximity to other children to have a social life (not that they foster one with face-to-face contact while they are gaming anyway), medicine has been politicized and we are now so afraid of unknowns that we’ll believe nearly anything else, and masks are a framework for mind control. Basically, we are showing our cards that we are a nation of runaway idiots.

Our problems are not really about what I’ve written above; this is about the parents and grandparents who are fundamentally under-educated for the convulsion moving through society brought on by the advancement of technology, the intellectual demands that arose from that, a system of unrestrained greed fostered in a speculative market surrounding housing, stocks, all things crypto, the changing opportunity found on a planet that became mobile and more global in our lifetimes. Then, add a worldwide stop to all travel, commerce, in-person education, banking, shopping, and medicine except for the most critical, and we have to recognize that culture is in upheaval. This doesn’t even stop to consider the ramifications of what’s on the horizon with the wholesale shift to electric cars, ships, and probably planes, along with energy systems that are rapidly evolving due to climate change. The myriad changes we are facing threaten to buckle the relative stability most of us in the West have grown up with.

Sadly, the wherewithal and knowledge of managing such a momentous global. cultural, economic, and educational change cannot move at the glacial pace we’ve grown accustomed to, but radical change will end up causing a whiplash that some will try to constrain due to their aversion to change. Fortunately, many of the changes are already baked in and will not be turned back, but instead of racing into the next set of challenges, there’s a likelihood that we’ll have to resort to the historical method of wrestling with profound change. In other words, war and mass death.

Education is the first thing that requires a full reset as we here in the United States are not teaching thinking (or reading, for that matter) but instead are squeezing individuality out of the herd that is massaged into a conformity soup where banality rules the day. We witness this every day, month to month, and year to year; it is our norm, and we give it a nod of appreciation as these are the people who are recognized as the most American, the true patriots known as the common man. They love guns, football, baseball, big cars and trucks, and big homes; they dress the same, eat the same, and think the same. Those on the outside of the norm are tattooed, addicted, alternative, LGBTQ, nerds, tree huggers, entrepreneurs, immigrants, and some of the most gifted when it comes to knowledge, acting, music, invention, and other areas that require immense skills that help entertain humanity.

America has long-neglected education in favor of the commodification of a workforce that can be tapped for enlisted military service, underpaid service industry jobs, blind consumerism, and a prison system that currently houses 2 million people but has processed 15 million Americans through its gears creating job security for the financial systems that benefit from that sector including police, courts, transportation, construction, food services, prison guards, prison-related clothing manufacturers, gang and community task forces, energy services, along with news media.

Education is the least likely facet of American life that will change in my lifetime because an abundance of under-performing people has always been the grease lubricating opportunities for wealth in all strata of our society aside from the lowest that ends up carrying the burden of poor education. We will likely remedy the environment first as class differentiation plays deeply into ego gratification because those lucky to benefit from their place in life need to feel something greater than luck has granted them dominion over the masses. We no longer truly believe in god and, as time passes, less in the sciences either, so we cannot look to divine gifts or real learning as having given leaders their positions and wealth, and so it must simply be their greatness that has elevated them. A solid education where logic and real discovery about how to spend a lifetime learning is a remedy to this lopsided current situation, but who among the fortunate want to share the slice of pie they covet?

More important than oil, big houses, and luxury goods, education is the only serious commodity that will allow superpowers to emerge and displace whatever current economic leader might be holding the reins. It is no longer even remotely important who controls bombs and soldiers as using war for meaningful population control would require a conflict that would eliminate 2 to 3 billion people from the surface of our planet, and that cannot be accomplished with bullets, so do we resort to nuclear war?

The war of minds rages on the battlefield of global influence where Squid Games, anime, burritos, Rammstein, luxury cars, authors, game developers, BTS, Fentanyl, the NFL, TikTok, Apple, Pokemon Go, Bitcoin, and the host of other daily salves to ease the pain of existence is consumed by people who will always need a constant resupply of their drugs. Who can best offer access to an alternative to the grind of subservience to a dead future will start to propel humanity, while those who only desire continued enslavement will be moved off the world stage.

While America appears to desire a debased life of drugs, guns, and the associated malaise that has arrived with the crushed opportunities facing a vast swath of its citizens due to a feeble system of hope standing in for proper education, we sit back with a remote control, game controller, or smartphone ignoring the big truths that are all around us. We are failing in spectacular ways while the majority can’t begin to comprehend the abysmal failure of both politics and a population that has abdicated its participation.

My lament regarding education is a constant refrain in my daily life; I must listen to, talk with, or simply witness the broad spectrum stupidity mindlessly enjoyed by a populace oblivious to their own shortcomings, just as I am too, in some unacknowledged ways. The difference might be that I’m trying to uncover what I don’t know, repair my own bias that was gleefully instilled in me by society at large, and discover what lays ahead, or at least that’s my delusional thinking. Maybe everyone else is incredibly intelligent, and my form of madness has blinded me to their brilliance, with my ego deluding me into believing I’m on a different plane.

I’m terrified at our prospects where so many must remain marginalized and the wealthy, educated minority cannot see the structural problems all around them; of course, seeing this would require them to leave gated communities, venture outside of airports, and truly consider reality. Our political leaders are hiding this by using a complicit media apparatus that is distracting as many as it can with nonsense and entertainment, all backed by a corporate machine that mints super wealth while watching Rome burn.

Reference #1: https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/h/Household_income_in_the_United_States.htm

Reference #2: Low Literacy Levels Among U.S. Adults Could Be Costing The Economy $2.2 Trillion A Year (forbes.com)

Image Credit: “Cliffside Path” by Frank Kehren is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0