America Must (And Can) Do Better

Now that we've crossed the 1 million COVID-19 cases threshold in America, I figured it was time to highlight one of the best articles I've read about the coronavirus in the past couple weeks comes from next month's The Atlantic. It's called "We Are Living in a Failed State" by George Packer. I mention it here because the author's message strikes a chord within me.

I personally saw the towers burn. I was there in New York that day. Then, 6 years later, as Packer describes, I personally experienced destitution at the hands of the Great Recession.

After those two experiences, quite frankly, who could blame me for wanting to GTFO of America? So I did.

What happened since I left The Country Formerly Known As Great (TCFKAG) in 2011 and chose, of my own freedom, to live in China, has been an absolute travesty of late stage capitalism.

We created an economy that screwed the regular people and glorified Manhattan and Silicon Valley snake oil salesmen who provide no positive value to society. In fact, those guys probably provide negative value to society as they divert capital from worthy causes to their own doomed-to-fail narcissistic initiatives.

And then we elected Trump, an outcome that I predicted as soon as he threw his hat in the ring. My expat friends called me crazy. But I'm from the South and I know just how base the American body politic is. "He's from the TV!" would be enough to get him elected. Throw in some masochism, racism, tons of money and a an incredibly prescient targeted online GOTV campaign, and it was. I still don't think he ever actually wanted to be president. And he's well on his way to winning the 2020 election campaign.

But here we are.

The United States of America is going to have to wrestle with a lot of questions once it finally decides that it's okay to go outside and re-start its economy again. We'll need a new political system that incentivizes experience and disincentivizes cronyism. We'll need a new economic system that lifts up what we are now calling "essential workers" and punishes the bureaucrats who make hundreds of thousands per year basically just to sit at a desk. We'll need to reorient our supply chain, our education systems, and our transportation systems, among countless other things.

Can we do that? Damn right we can!

We're fucking America!

So let's stop fucking America and go be We The People and sort this shit out.