my journey to one million dollars, special edition

we ain't thinking our way out of this one

Strap in bitch, it’s time to feel bad.

I do not like to lose. Yet, most of my life has been spent working on losing projects.

No, I am not talking about elections. Yet.

I cannot remember the last time I felt like I was doing anything but triage. Aside from a brief stint where I had a fake copywriting job, I’ve spent the vast majority of my working life accepting or bandaging trauma. Whether it’s been crisis centers, suicide hotlines, overnight shelters, or domestic violence shelters, if there’s a job where you try to get people up over the first rung of Maslow’s hierarchy, I’ve done it.

Why? I’m not sure. It’s probably some combination of personal trauma and guilt. Reason not the need. I’m a should guy, not a why guy. I do what makes sense to me and what helps me get out of bed in the morning. I’m a black-and-white thinker.

What I can say with certainty, is that, for the past 19 years of my life, the Great Satan has gotten demonstrably worse. When I was younger, I didn’t question why. I didn’t question why when I was a 22-year-old AmeriCorps VISTA, I was paid at the poverty line. Of course, my train of thought went at the time, this rule was designed to teach me that poverty was bad, that immiseration destroys lives. But at no point did I ask why I needed a lesson from the government that I had already learned as a child? Why was it necessary for me to get yet another lesson about poverty?

I’ve watched our welfare state go from anemic to emaciated, and before long it will be non-existent. I work at a non-profit that does what a welfare state should but is incapable of. Every month, there is more need, more people ravaged by capitalism, and less to fill that need. And as this happens, I watch new properties that I could never afford to live in pop up, their rooms empty, a reminder that if you want to survive in America, you gotta become a rent-seeker.

America is about class warfare, plain and simple. At the foundation, it is a country built on the extermination of an indigenous population and an infrastructure built by slaves. No amount of voting, hand-wringing, shaming, ra-raing, Aaron Sorkin Newsroom speeches, or any other bit of agitprop you and I have been force-fed our entire lives will change that. There is a capitalist class, and there is a working class, and the capitalist class is doing an excellent job grinding the working class into paste while making them believe that what is happening to them isn’t happening, and it is good and just that it is happening to imaginary enemies.

The average person is addicted to losing and has completely been crushed by shame of it. The average person has accepted that the game is rigged, but they’re going to keep pushing the button on the slot machine regardless. It makes me insane, and I’m always just completely gobsmacked that people think that somehow there’s a way to make a boot on your neck cozier without removing the boot.

And if that sounds bad, here’s something even worse. We’re all cowards, or we’ve been made to be. Everyone watched as our country upgraded to a new right-wing tier, mouths agape. How could this happen!? I was hoping really hard that the reality I’ve been watching my entire adult life would somehow ~not~ be reality.

The cowardice of which I speak is not complex, though I see people making it so, masking it with feelings of dread and horror. We talk about our rights and our privilege, and how the bad things are going to happen, when the bad things are happening and have been happening every day for my entire life.

We all hope, see, that someone else is going to clean up the mess, make the world we claim we want for ourselves. When nobody magically appears to fight for that world, we contort ourselves into a human centipede, believing that a soul-less monster cop stooge lady who allies with one of the greatest war criminals of all time will take up the mantle. When she fails, spectacularly, well, we’re just left with our twisted selves. We’re left with the horrific realization that if you want anything to be better, you want anything to be good, you’re going to have to change.

And I don’t just mean having new opinions. I mean quitting your job, changing your life, getting out into the streets and scaring the hell out of the capitalist class.

But that’s not what happens. We stay exactly the same. I write little newsletters. I keep doing triage. You blame something else. You forget. The cavalry is coming.

The cavalry is coming.