The Great American Delusion

I don't hate America. I don't hate my fellow countrymen and women but I do feel angry and annoyed at them and I sure wish I could knock some sense into their minds with my words. I wish my writing could make a difference in the world.

So much online writing these days is for entertainment purposes only. That may be fine and dandy for you but not for me. I'm all for entertainment but not when it becomes the focus of our lives and the driving force behind the marketing of products and services in the American machine of corporate consumerism.

Americans are the best when it comes to worshiping the absolute materialism of pop culture. It's our nature to want things but do Americans really need so much? The answer is yes and no. Yes because we've been brainwashed to believe in the gluttonous greed of the American Dream and no because the world has become much too overpopulated for such and excessive and extravagant dream to make sense.

What makes sense is downsizing when everyone is supersizing. What makes sense is learning when enough is enough and too much is too much. Sadly, this goes against every grain of the great American Delusion: we want what we want when we want it and we'll be doggoned if we don't get it. We deserve the best, the finest things in life, and so do our children, right?

The great American hat trick is life, liberty, and the pursuit of making it into the upper crust of society. The top 1% of the wealthiest Americans always have and always will get what they want. They're the crème de la crème; the well-off, well-heeled, and well-to-do aristocrats who make it all seem like such a swell dream. It's not. It's a big fat lie. It's all a facade and the epitome of becoming a shallow snob of a human being. It's fake, like a dream in real life.

Smart and intelligent people, even those who run with the filthy rich creeps of the cultured class, know what the important things in life are: to love and be loved, to enjoy the simple things in life and to share them with family and friends, to have health and the freedom to express ourselves and to pursue our dreams, and to have meaningful work or at least to make an honest wage for the work that most of us must do.

I don't hate the haut monde and their country club lifestyles, but I do despise what their haughty lifestyles represent: ignorant arrogance and excessive opulence in a well-bred barn of Orwellian pigs who've swallowed the phrase, "all animals are created equal but some animals are more equal than others" hook, line, and sinker.

It's so easy to become one of them. It's human nature to want more, but how much do we really need to be happy in this life? Top dogs and fat cats throughout human history have always taken their ordained and inherent places at the private feeding toughs of the privileged class. You can't beat them, so you might as well join them, right?

I wish I were talented enough as writer to say something meaningful and important about the current barnyard of bad news on the planet. We're all going in the wrong direction. Am I the only writer who sees the world this way? It's all so complicated. Maybe the best thing for me to do is grab a cup of Starbucks and get lost in a little mindless entertainment. Yeah, that's the ticket. For as the expression goes, "When in Rome..."