The Problem With America

The problem with America is that we are good people pretending to be bad people.

We are like those schoolyard tough guys who protect the small and weak kids when no one’s looking. We threaten and posture and act as if we will truly turn our backs on the weak and helpless among us. In this way, we aspire to a brash, damn-the-torpedoes bravado that no great nation can ever embrace. A mature society sees the world as it is, not as it wishes it to be.

It is cheaper and more productive for society to pay for a woman’s birth control than for the consequences of her pregnancy. It is cheaper and more productive for society to pay for universal healthcare on the front end than to pay for all the unpaid bills and bankruptcies on the back end. The COVID vaccine costs twenty-five bucks; a week on a ventilator costs twenty-five thousand. We insist on self-sufficiency and personal responsibility, but if you spend your whole life blowing through a dollar and a half of every dollar you make, we make sure you aren’t homeless and that you don’t starve to death, even if you never paid a dime into the system. We say we have to get tough with countries that we still manage to send billions of dollars a year. We say that the only way to come here is legally, but we still have expensive mechanisms in place to care for the people who don’t, along with plenty of cash-under-the-table jobs for them if they get through.

If we are going to be the tough guys that the posturers on TV and in the Congress say we are, then our old people and unwanted children are going to have to die alone in the streets. Two-pack a day smokers are going to have to be turned away from hospitals without cancer treatment right along with the anti-vaxxer who needs a ventilator because we have freedom of choice. Pregnant teenage girls who have always been told that sex is a sin and birth control pills are Satan’s Pez candy are going to have to kill their babies with coat hangers or leave them in Walmart bathrooms (oh, and we had better designate hills outside of town to leave the babies on to die like the ancient Romans did) because we’re out of the compensating-for- your-bad-choices business and we told you that decisions have consequences. Your wages will be garnished for life to pay for your past due medical bills and if you lose your house over it, there’s the street. If Grandma never paid into Social Security or Medicare, we have giant excavations on the outskirts of town (next to the Exposed Baby Hills) where we can put her body. It’s not a wall we need at the border, it’s gun turrets, and we will simply mow down with machine gun fire anyone who approaches.

⁠If we’re going to cleave to these lofty principles, we are going to have to stand by while our fellow Americans die, some because of their choices, some because of bad luck, but hey, either way, not our problem. We are going to have to ignore the world until it’s on fire or someone rolls on up to attack us.

This tough talk sounds good on TV or on the campaign trail or on social media, but it’s all a fantasy. None of the people posturing are actually prepared to follow through on it, so it simply becomes a way to put a black-and-white, my-way-or-the-highway, too-bad-for-you position out there that makes them look good but has no basis in reality. It leaves other people to clean up the messes they refuse to admit exist, and it paralyzes our government and our society while we argue over hypotheticals.

⁠If we’re bad guys, let’s go all in. If we’re not, let’s at least be forthright about it and do the right thing in a way that doesn’t keep the country divided, stupid, dysfunctional, and broke.