Blame America

America needs some fucking tough love right now. Listen to me, guys, somebody should've told you this a long time ago, or maybe they have been and you're just ... not ... listening. Take out the iPod earbuds and turn off the TV a minute. No, you can't just leave it on mute and watch it behind my back. I want to talk to you about something serious here. I think you have a problem. I think you've been acting like a goddamn lot of children.

You know how after you graduate college, you pretend for a little while that you're a real adult cuz you're out on your own, but really you have no goddamn idea what's going on, and you don't care because you want to do things your way, but "your way" is really just an excuse for being irresponsible and putting the blame on everybody else, and meanwhile your bills stack up and you end up paying a lot of your very hard-earned money on debt collectors and overdraft fees - but that's ok, cuz you're doing it your way, you're making your mistakes, you convince yourself that these mistakes are what it means to be free and there's a learning curve. It doesn't matter if debts and overdrafts are unfair, all you need to do is perfect your approach, and it'll all come together.

Come to find out it doesn't work like that.

It is exactly your blundering insistence on individuality that seals your goddamn doom. You know what's being done is unfair. (It's the same way with wars and the economy and rush hour traffic.) As long as you keep doing things your way, you'll be ok, it will be somebody else's problem, the trouble isn't you, it's all those goddamn other people who support the war or take the freeway home. Or it's the government's fault for letting banks get away with stuff. Eventually the government will catch on, right? - you'll keep voting and eventually you'll get a politician who'll be like, "Whelp, bout time to hold the banks accountable," and you won't have to pay overdraft fees again.

And that's exactly what happened - except increasingly now the so-called "middle class" is relying on paycheck advance - once a quaint feature of the topolganger lower class neighborhoods, now available in the common grounds of WalMart and internet banking. Which, as of this writing, isn't that popular a subject on the internet, despite outrageously high APR (120% at US Bank). Some US states made paycheck advance illegal; however, the point is that by sitting by and letting some nebulous "someone else" deal with it, we let "someone else" dictate the terms and conditions of our lives.

We act as though as long as we mind our own business, nothing is going to bother us. Having to think about politics or the economy isn't as important as doing our job and feeding our families. We just want to be left alone. That's all the American Dream has come down to: "Shut up and let me sleep."

9/11 was a rude awakening many people are still trying to out-maneuver. Terrorism - can't be bothered to examine the cause of it, must have some easy answer like "they hate us" (a sullen child's analysis if I've ever heard one). Here are a panel of experts (who made them experts? Who knows), I will copy down what they say, I will use it as a shortcut to absolve myself of responsibility. I cannot be held responsible for my country's foreign policy; it's just not up to me! I'm trying to work and have a family here, I'm upholding my part of the bargain by pursuing the American Dream, look what they have on sale for me today. ("Heart-shaped potholders? It's like they knooowwww me!!")

In reality, the system we allow to run rampant kills people abroad and enslaves them to corporate interests. We all know our government and our corporations are doing things that are downright abominable, things that would make our skin run cold if we could actually stand in the presence of the events. If we could watch an Afghani wedding party get blown up by a drone, it would fucking break us. Instead we hide from our complicity and make fucking excuses. "It's too hard, it's too much, I'm just one person, what am I supposed to do, I know it's wrong but what choice do I have, no one else is doing anything so I won't make any difference."

You fucking slimeballs. You've ingested all this stuff about how America is the best country in the world, and you parrot that, but you won't stand up against injustice? What kind of legacy do you think has been passed down to you? Cowardice? Helplessness? Apathy? Are these the values you stand for? Do you think you're doing your children, or your siblings, or your parents, your friends and coworkers any favors by standing on society's sidelines and shrugging like a sociopath? No wonder we can't look one another in the eyes. No wonder we snap at the fast food workers who get our orders wrong, or the retail worker whose been on her feet eight hours with a holiday line that never seems to move for her or you. You choose not to have empathy, because that might mean your little nugget of a head for once.

And you have no idea, not one goddamn clue, what's out there, do you?