Guilt and Good Luck

 Believe me, I know how insane it is to be middle class, retired and on Social Security and Medicare, to own my own home and be debt free, and—above all else—white in 2025 America (or as the rest of the “Americans” know us, the United States) and to be incredibly, deeply sad and embarrassed for and by my country, my home, my neighbors, and myself.  Please believe me when I say I am not asking for sympathy.  I realize that I have lived a blessed life and have done very little to deserve it.  Too much of where I am came from luck in the genetic lottery, in the time and place where I was born, and over my lifetime luck is more responsible for my current situation than anything I have done.  I have definitely worked hard and I’ve tried to be responsible, frugal, and practical, but there were several moments in my life where a serious disease or injury to me or anyone in my immediate family would have torn the whole house of cards down.  It was only luck that prevented that from happening, no matter how much effort I put into avoiding it.

Hopefully, without minimizing the pain and suffering other less fortunate people have experienced, I want to say it still has not been a bed of roses, even for me.  My wife and I began our lives together in extreme-to-moderate poverty, certainly well below the poverty line, for almost a decade.  The “education system” in western Kansas in the 50s and 60s was at least as regressive and mismanaged as the right-wing politically-incorrect torture chamber of foolishness we subject kids to today.  Those were the days of corporal punishment, lawless cops without body cameras or anyone avaialble with th equipment to film their abuses, and when bullying was the way large white men and boys were supposed to behave to “get ahead.” 

My father was a high school math and business accounting teacher, but he didn’t know much about either subject compared to the teachers I was lucky enough to experience 25 years later in southern California.  Most of what he tried to pass on to me and my siblings was religious nonsense.  He was desperately short on practical advice and my step-mother was flat-out delusional.  After being given the “live in my house, go to my church” ultimatum at the end of my junior year, I chose to live somewhere else for my last year of high school.  I thought I had a life plan at the time and didn’t see much use for what passed for “education” in western Kansas.  So, my last year of school was mostly spent in study hall (3 units of that) and skipping school entirely (which probably gave me the best education I’d receive in those years).   

The United States has, rarely, been even moderately competent at providing public education, especially for the children of the 99%.  For brief moments in time, California, Detroit, the Twin Cities in Minnesota, and a select few spots in the country have experimented with actually teaching kids useful stuff in the way that kids learn, but the regressives that call themselves “conservatives” always find a way to destroy it from within.  I honestly do not think the average American citizen has any business reproducing, based on just that fact.  We’re just not smart enough to be parents.  Maybe that’s true for the species.

However, being white (Yes, “pink,” Bianca.) in this country in the last 300 years pretty much eliminates any real excuse for personal failure unless serious illness (mental or physical) or injury is involved.  Donald Trump and his minions prove that intelligence, education, skill, creativity, or decency are totally unnecessary if you are white, born rich, and . . . that’s all that is necessary.  Even without the silver spoon full of designer pabulum, being white is a passkey to US middle class with even moderate effort.  As several comedians have noted, if you are white in this country and you are poor, “That’s on you.”  You just didn’t make a half-decent effort.

The MAGA outrage against the “woke virus” is nothing more than white people and other examples of personal failure wanting to bury the fact that every spec of their own personal failures is “on them.”  The fact that Florida Governor Ricky Desantis’ General Counsel, Ryan Newman, could tell a court that “woke” is “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them” with a straight face and no expectation of outright ridicule from anyone able to understand those words says . . . everything.  You have to be a special variety of stupid, vile, lazy, and worse to believe there are no “systemic injustices” in a country founded on slavery and spawned from the offspring of the worst human monsters in history, the Barbados colonizers.  And having lived among rural Midwestern Americans for too much of my life, that has been overwhelmingly my experience of my “neighbors.” 

As Barak Obama famously explained in a 2008 campaign speech, “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

“And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”   As usua, the truth hurts.  Obama took a lot of flack for the “guns or religion” portion of that explanation, but he was dead on the money explaining who those angry, unskilled, uneducated, lazy, and entitled voters are and have been for at least 250 years.  They are the 76M “low information” voters who elected Trump in 2024 and who cursed the country with his pack of vandals in 2016 and they were, sadly, under-represented in the 1,000,000 US citizens Trump murdered during the pandemic.  

Solutions for this undemocratic mess are complicated and highly unlikely to succeed.  The “clear, simple, and wrong” answer  to all of our “complex problems” is fascism.  Democracy’s biggest advantage is adaptability and fascism is a foolish and hopeless attempt to drive a flag in the ground to keep change from happening.  Change happens, regardless of human desires and, today, with the inventory of human knowledge doubling every 12 hours and with that interval shrinking by the year, even a year of wallowing in entitlement self-pity will be enough to set the country back to where it will never be competitive again.  That is the formula for empire collapse.

The United States tried to stop the world from spinning so fast in 1952, electing Dwight Eisenhower on the ultimate low-brow slogan, “I Like Ike,” and a variety of slightly-shaded racism, blatantly dishonest anti-communist dogma, anti-evolution-based public education distortions, and 1%-fueled campaign funded by “businessmen” who wanted the government to serve only the rich and powerful (sound familiar?).  Instead, the working class got an anti-union federal government that started the long process of disassembling the middle class, an education system that produced so few useful technical people that when Russia launched Sputnik, Eisenhower’s response was pitiful at best and embarrassing repeatedly.  K     ennedy launched a national public education push that resulted in the next 20 years of prosperity, ending with Reagan’s dribble-down economics and being dead-and-buried by Gingrich’s “Contract on America.”

But, if you look at that “Information Age” curve, hopefully you’ll see that regardless of US participation, human knowledge is on an exponential curve to who-knows-where? Americans have an overly developed sense of importance, which might have been somewhat deserved after WWII, but Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Grenada, Lybia, Iraq I, Panama, Iraq II, Afghanistan, Iraq III, Syria, and, now, Trump and his brand of expansionist fascism have made us one of the world’s most unstable and unpredictable terrors.  It wouldn’t take much for the rest of the “free world” to decide to permanently distance itself from the United States, defending Mexico and Canada from us.  As weak as Republicans have made the country in just barely over a month, it’s not hard to imagine this union disassembling itself in a civil war. If you have illusions about how a civil war works, Salvador Dali pretty much nailed it.  It won’t be pretty and there won’t be any real “winners.” If that happens, we’ll all be out of luck.