Elections!
Why real change is not forthcoming.
November 1, 2024
Voting is important but it is not nearly enough on its own. There’s a reason that no matter who wins we can be sure that income and wealth inequality will continue to widen, the average person will have to work more hours per week for the same essentials, socioeconomic mobility will keep declining, women’s health will remain at risk, children will be gunned down in classrooms, gay rights will be under attack, transgender and non-binary folk will not be safe, people of color will be brutalized by the police, innocent people will be executed by the state, the U.S. will lead the world (by a shocking distance) in incarceration rates, we will also lead the world in healthcare spending per capita only to achieve the worst health outcomes; U.S.-made weapons will continue to maim and obliterate women and children in refugee camps, the next pandemic will find us woefully unprepared, inconvenient people around the world will suffer due to our voracious need to secure crucial resources regardless of social and environmental costs, and we will doggedly persist in dismissing climate science and ignoring the blaring alarms being sounded from every critical planetary system.
And all of this will continue despite America as a whole getting comparatively richer.
But we won’t meaningfully alter course because America is also uniquely oblivious and uniquely spoiled and uniquely complicit—at least those who have been admitted or can otherwise gain passage into the club known as “Real America”.
This is why real change isn’t forthcoming, because it would require that we fundamentally restructure the entire system, starting with a hard look in the mirror. But Real Americans aren’t big on humility and self-reflection. We only know that we’re special and that we are entitled to the best of everything because our white-washed history tells us so and even if we’re personally suffering some of the adverse outcomes listed above it’s only because certain someone’s are taking that which they don’t deserve and is rightfully ours.
But the culprit is definitely not those who have the most already and benefit exorbitantly from the status quo. Perhaps because deep down that’s who most of us aspire to be. And anyway, our wealthy exemplars, being the benevolent patrons that they are, have assured us that it is actually the least among us who are to blame—and the immigrants! Of course, we’ll believe them because we are easily dazzled by image and opulence and have developed a habit of punching down rather than up.
But no matter how we vote the immigrants will keep coming because the Imperialist Machine of which we are dependents has ravaged their homelands and their socio-political structures while expropriating their resources, and the Behemoth economy built upon these ill-gotten gains will continue to demand more labor than we can supply on our own.
But we’ll keep pining for some idealized version of the Real America we know and love—usually imagined as that golden age undergirded by racial apartheid and race-based immigration quotas—and we’ll keep lashing out because we’re not getting our way which means we won’t do the adult thing of devising an immigration system that humanely and efficiently rebalances the equation because our racist impulse is too strong—the same racist impulse that created this imbalance to begin with.
Even though some of us will be quick to declare that we’re not like those knuckle-draggers that blame immigrants for everything we are still going to give in to fear mongering about the undesirables while also preoccupying ourselves with the cheap gas and groceries we deserve and the latest iphone and the same-day Amazon delivery for that cool thing we saw on instagram 5 minutes ago made surprisingly affordable thanks to the modern miracle of forever plastics which also make possible the discount flights to get a break from the house with the big yard that we love but also hate because now we have a longer commute bedeviled by the never-ending traffic that we always curse without reflecting for a second how we consistently vote against every major public transportation project proposed because “Not in my backyard!”
And no matter how we vote we still won’t take the time to learn how all these things are entirely connected and also entirely at odds with each other.
We sure as hell won’t learn about multiplier effects, human capital theory, demographic dividends, urban ecology, colonial and imperialist history, environmental science, entropic degradation and thermodynamic limits to become an informed citizenry that is capable of driving the kind of change that will actually make a difference.
And because we see the world through a self-serving lens we will not consider the totality of human experience and we sure as hell won’t sacrifice a single convenience for the betterment of humankind and life on earth. Despite all the warnings, there is one thing we will all agree on. We must grow ourselves out of this predicament. The answer must be more for everybody because nobody should ever be expected to settle for less no matter how much they already have.
Grow or die—it is the one, true, bipartisan religion of this country. It is the one thing that will endure through the political fluctuations, fragmentations and conflagrations.
But the more we grow the more the rich will continue to get richer and the more everyone else will keep falling farther behind. And we’ll continue to be too stupid, too sheep-like, to recognize the funnel in which we’ve become trapped. We’ll be so sheep-like, we’ll leap to the defense of the wealthy elite like the sacred cows we’ve made them out to be whenever the slightest rebalancing is suggested. After all, it takes great talent and vision to hoard the vast majority of the planet’s natural resources while most of the world’s citizens struggle for the basic necessities and wildlife dies off at mass extinction-level rates.
As the New Testament probably says, if we’re reading it correctly, wealth is the root of all ingenuity and overall awesomeness. And hell, we’d all like to hoard some for ourselves, if we’re to be honest. So why don’t we just go ahead and leave that door open.
This means we’ll work more hours and use more energy and consume more goods and take more lavish vacations to escape the mounting stress while accepting that natural resources will need to be extracted at increasingly higher rates and unprecedented emissions will just have to go on a little longer so we can live our best lives. And when everything keeps getting more expensive and conflict is on the rise and everyone seems to be getting sicker and there’s increased flooding and drought and the bees are disappearing and the coral reefs are dying and the glaciers are melting and the jet streams collapsing and our children’s futures in doubt we’ll just shake our heads and grumble about how someone ought to do something about it. And when our heads start to hurt we’ll turn on the game or our favorite show or app to decompress and wait for the next election to come around which will definitely be the most important election of our lifetime.
Because everything’s going to shit and it’s high time we finally made some real changes as long as none of it crimps our lifestyle—those of us already comfortable that is. You know, like the kind of people that if they go missing or turn up dead are splashed all over the news. I mean, some faraway or unseen inconvenient people will probably suffer and die while we figure it out, but that’s how it’s always been—at least as far back as most of us have read.
But somebody has the answers and it’s probably someone with lots of followers who loves to hear themselves speak and smiles nice for the camera and knows how to keep things simple and assures us what we knew all along which is that we can have it all at a cost of almost nothing because of something that is so common-sense sounding I can’t believe all these supposed experts didn’t think of it already.
Now that’s what we like to call Real American leadership.
In fact, most of us already have an eye on the next budding prodigy, and next time around, they’re going to be the one who finally leads us to salvation. But we’re going to have to line up behind them and fight-fight-fight for the change we all deserve.
Then it will be back to our favorite distraction which is the round-the-clock theatrics, drama and hysteria along with the fake association and steady supply of dopamine hits we receive when separating into our respective tribalistic camps while the purveyors of dysfunction continue to harness our fear and outrage and insecurities into "engagements" which magically translate into profits.
And we’ll keep letting them because we still haven’t learned.
The truth is our momentary comforts and luxuries inextricably dependent on someone or something else’s harm and misery. It is an untenable state of affairs and as long as we fool ourselves into believing it is sustainable we’ll never have peace.
It has nothing to do with morality or ethical justice. It is simply a matter of inviolable physical law—like Newton’s Third Law of Motion which states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
But these are hard truths demanding even harder decisions, so we will just keep on filling in the bubbles on our ballots which are more like placebo buttons because they excuse us from the real work of navigating our way out of this mess we have created for not only ourselves but all life on earth. And when planetary systems come crashing down on us we’ll be shocked that our trusted leaders and industrial titans and our favorite talking heads misled us and sold us out for extra power and profits—probably so they could insulate themselves from the very catastrophes they assured us were hoaxes.
But mostly we’ll be shocked that we let them get away with it.
