We have no national dialog about the responsibility of individuals to themselves aside from being economically self-sufficient. There are arbitrary rules and motifs that instill fear, anxiety, and anger, but ideas about societal direction emerging from the intellect are negated and ridiculed. I hate this subject because I feel that I’m trying to tell free people what is good for them and that my ideas have relevance – when I have no sense of certainty that anything I know has any meaning to others. I do believe I know that the bedrock of a culture is its relationship to the humanities, which act as a catapult for progress. In the United States, we have marginalized the liberal arts as some demonic, anti-American, woke agenda that steals our national identity and makes white men superfluous. Survivors’ guilt, imposter syndrome, and fear drive the petty hate machine disassembling the building blocks of what sustained this country, and we are now on a trajectory of capitulating to the worst part of our natures.
Of all the crap I write, this is the most difficult as I feel it is the most evident. How do those around me not recognize the grotesque facade of mediocrity we now wear? Of course, we are all aware that the American emperor is fully naked, but who wants to tell an angry man armed with all the guns that his insipid stance that he’s a god is not reality? Do I sound angry? I’m disappointed and probably angry too. I’ve always felt on the margin where hate is directed at those who dare question the soundness of a laissez-faire approach regarding the ability to project knowledge forward. We encourage wealth, strength, belligerence, winning, thuggery, and violence through our complicity to not have the ambition to better explore what we don’t know, namely ourselves.
Read the wrong post from me, and you might believe I’m an unhappy old man, but you’d be wrong, though there is certainly a streak of frustration in my conversation that hardly does me a favor. At the heart of this is my peculiar, probably unreasonable, desire that others be guided into finding a path to their own happiness within the parameters they are capable of. The bulwark that is modern American life that deludes and tricks people into ideas of grandeur, though, is a greater force than I might ever muster in my musings that go unread by all but my wife.
For example, between yesterday and today, it was announced that Bed Bath & Beyond will close 400 of their 691 stores, but on the bright side, stores such as Dollar General, Family Dollar, Dollar Tree, and Five Below are expanding like mad. Take Dollar General who last year opened 1,039 new locations and is on track to open 1,050 this year using a $2 billion investment because poverty shopping in America is growing. Remember the days when Walmart was America’s low-cost shopping destination? Well, they appear to be the new Macy’s or Nordstroms, while the coterie of dollar discounters become go-to shops for those on the margin. And don’t tell me that people just want to save money: they don’t have the money to save; they are trying to survive.
Another can of worms opened as I was relating some of what I’m writing to a friend; I started looking up how many Dollar General (19,022), Dollar Tree (16,000), Family Dollar (8,267), Goodwill (8,000), and Five Below stores (1,367) there are in the United States, and I came up with more than 52,000 stores catering specifically to the poor. Compare this to only 13,272 McDonald’s distributed across the country, the comparatively tiny number of 4,648 Walmarts, or the 514 branches of Whole Foods. Poverty is big business in the United States, and while people make fun of “Whole Paycheck,” relatively few people can ever afford to shop there compared to where a much larger number of people spend the little they have.
Meanwhile, Phoenix has a homeless camp in its downtown area in which, according to the New York Times, as many as 1,100 people live, while AZFamily believes there are close to “7,500 individuals experiencing homelessness” in Maricopa County. One out of every 100 Americans uses meth, about 3 out of 100 misuse opioids, and 380 people die daily from alcohol-related issues. Continuing on this grim march, every day, 192 people die from drug overdoses, 125 people decide to take their own lives, and there are nearly 3 million Americans in jail or prison. Does this sound like a country that is healthy? Oh, and don’t forget that there are between 600,000 and 1.5 million homeless people spread across our great land. We are talking about nearly 1 in 10 Americans whose life is a tragic mess that they struggle to survive.
These are symptoms of a system that is breaking down NOT only due to a failing government, corporate tyranny, or some secret cabal it is each and every American who has no connection to the ideas of what helps form a functional society where the quality of life is improving for most everyone. It is education, and I do not want to imply that our teachers are the ones failing us; it is the individuals who do not take pride or have any effective measure if they are truly smart or profoundly stupid, as this is not something we as a society really want to understand. We are a country based on the idea that I have the freedom to be as stupid or smart as I choose to be, and who are you to judge me?