People in the USA can’t afford to lose everything by missing even a week of work. I’m dead serious. If you do a shutdown, you will get fired. If you get fired, you will lose your access to healthcare, assuming you have any. There is no housing protection and no food safety net in place to help people who commit to a cause.
Now, let’s say none of that mattered. Something close to 2/3rds of Americans cannot cover an emergent $500 expenditure. To fly from the west coast to DC in order to protest costs about $1000. Driving across the country costs even more.
Now, let’s say none of that mattered. The USA has about 2 million of its citizens in prison at any given time. This doesn’t account for the implementation of concentration camps both throughout the USA and abroad to hold people detained by ICE, including American citizens, some of whom have been deported to countries that they have never been to.
Now, let’s say none of that mattered. Slavery is still 100% legal in the USA as punishment for a crime under the 13th amendment. The cool thing about slaves is that you can assign them to do whatever. Maybe you work a call center for a corporation, maybe you get sent out to fight wildland forest fires, or even disaster relief cleanup. For those that are compensated, the average across state rate is $0.62 per hour. If you refuse to participate, the consequences start with the removal privileges, escalate to solitary confinement, and eventually you get transferred to a higher security facility.
Now, let’s say none of that mattered. While in prison you will be exposed to abuses including but not limited to the following: physical violence, sexual assault, excessive force, and systemic retaliation.
All of this can happen as a result of 1 serious offense, where the seriousness of the offense is determined largely by the current presidential administration. A typical felony case in the US will cost you about $5,000 unless you go with a public defender. A public defender still costs money, but the cost is less and their services are funded through a sliding scale fee based on the defendant’s income, plus court filing fees. While there is no difference in the severity of the outcome of provided by a public defender, there is a difference in the timeline, with public defender caseloads requiring longer timelines to get before the court. It’s not a huge difference, but remember where you would be waiting it out.
So, as a parent in the USA I have to decide if I want to protest against the government. This is an unseen entity on the other side of the country. My job is dope, so I could actually do this. I could buy a ticket, take the time off work, travel to Washington DC, protest, get arrested, pay the money to expedite my trial and return to my family in, let’s say, a calendar year, during which time I would lose my job, income, and healthcare benefits and my daughter cannot go to college or really count on any type of inheritance. I have to decide if that is a price that I am willing to pay. Given that we live in a high surveillance police state, the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of me being caught. This also assumes that the federal government doesn’t gun me down in the streets, which is now a real possibility.
Or I can do nothing, hope that the old fucks in government die off (they are all very old), and generally live a decent life. I know that the government has no qualms about destroying my life or those of my fellow citizens on a large-scale basis. It’s seriously not worth the risk. Does that make me complicit in the atrocities committed by my government both at home and abroad? Sure does. Does it spare me being the victim of those atrocities personally? Sure does.
This isn’t written as an excuse for the average American’s behavior. It is written to provide some insight into why the average American doesn’t take up arms or even publicly resist the government. The average American is scared of losing access to the incredible amount of wealth and privilege that we enjoy. We know that it is all built on outsourced oppression. As long as we don’t make waves, we can enjoy access to shitty food, mass produced culture, and use internet filters to block out the bad news that we don’t want to see.
Where the real money is, in terms of political change in the USA, is lone wolf violence. Not the fake stuff coordinated by the President, but actual nut-job, mass-shooting, cars-into-crowds, crazy home invasion political action. Since I am a regular-ass human being, none of that is reasonable to me. But the other side has people who are sure as shit willing to throw their lives away on a murder charge because they believe, rightfully so, that they have a non-zero chance at a political pardon followed by a boost in income from becoming a minor celebrity to their cause, and literally no access to mental healthcare or opposing viewpoints. Even if my fake-ass “left” political party was in power, I couldn’t get away with that.
So, yeah, that was off-the-cuff and a bit of a ramble, but I hope that it provided some insight to, without condoning, the behavior of the typical American citizen.
How else are we going to be number one in personal debt? (I don’t know if that’s actually true, but I wouldn’t be surprised.)