Medium - June 1th, 2020
Last night, I turned on the news, and America was burning. City after city. Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia. The list seemed to be endless. Every one of America's great cities was on fire.
America is burning, but the flames only reflect a deeper fire.
America is burning with rage, with fury, with disappointment, with resentment. It's shaking with anger. It's screaming in grief. America is burning like a trash fire on the rubble of a broken dream.
The spark that set off this fire was of course the killing of yet another black person in spectacularly violent fashion. The one way I've never seen a person die even in movies is with a knee to the throat... for minutes on end... being slowly suffocated to a painful, lingering death. And yet in the dystopia America's become, this is the kind of thing that's now broadcast to an entire nation. And to a world. The world watched with me, in horror, as America burned.
America is a country in something far, far beyond any mere "crisis". A hundred thousand plus are dead. Less than five thousand needed to die. 40 million are unemployed. Less than 4 million needed to be. I could go on. Crisis? This is a social collapse. The real thing.
And that brings me to the meaning of these protests.
One way to see them is black people taking to the streets, fed up with their mistreatment. But the protests, this time, aren't just black people. And they seem to be about much, much more than that.
These protests are a cry of desperation and hopelessness from the throat of a broken nation.
They're the seams of a nation ripping apart. They're the fragile, withered bones of a society finally snapping apart – crrrack! They're the last, bitter desperate howl of a dying, wounded country.
These protests are spreading because America has failed.
It has failed at three things. One, being a society, as in a set of people who care for each other, instead of merely brutalize one another. Two, failed at progressing towards becoming a modern, civilized society. Three, failed the majority and minorities both (no, not equally – just... both.)
These protests express the profound, lacerating anguish of a society failing.
As an idea. As a state, as a society, as en economy, as a culture – in every way imaginable, really. They are the tormented scream of a collapsing society, descending backwards into barbarity, hate, folly and violence, at light-speed.
What happens when societies die ?
They scream out in rage, shock, fear, and pain. This is what the protests are.
These aren't organized protests, a movement. They're made of all kinds of people – black, brown, white, and everything in between. And they spread across the country... bang!... like that. Now what, they say? Now what? Where do we go now that our ship has sunk? Save our souls.
These protests reflect a feeling that runs deep now, that cuts to the bone.
A grim dissatisfaction with American life. A resentment at the degradation that Americans have to endure. A hopelessness that anything can ever really change now for the better. They are signals of a kind of embittered rage at the dystopia America has become. They are cries against the legendary cruelty and brutality that American life is made of now. And most of all, they are protests against exploitation and injustice, which has become the defining experience of American life, for too many.
Yes, especially for black people. But not just black people, now, too.
That is, I think, why so many white people have joined in. That is why they erupted across every city. American life has imploded. These are rebellions against injustice, against racism, against brutality, cruelty, exploitation – all of which has become a way of life in America.
How unjust is American life ?
What does the average American have ?
Nothing...
I mean that factually...!
Americans of a certain kind will go into anger and denial when I say that, and yet it's a fact. The average American now dies in debt, which means they end up having... nothing. They never own or earn or save a penny. All the things they appear to have are had on debt, which is unpayable. Life is “lunch debt” becoming “student debt” becoming credit card debt and a mortgage becoming “medical debt.”
Americans have been left with nothing.
They are the world's first poor rich country. That is why even the white American is now living a life of degradation, poverty, and ruin. Off he goes, every day, trying to find work. If he's lucky, he has one of the last few stable jobs in the economy. But putting food on the table is a constant struggle. 80% of Americans struggle to pay the bills. The American must therefore submit to whatever kind of exploitation he's offered as “work,” just in order to pay “the bills,” which really mean... the unpayable debts. Do you see what I mean by degradation, cruelty, and brutality ?
Now. You might say – «So what! Black people still have it much, much worse!» Of course they do. But the question is why. Why have black people effectively made little to no progress since the civil rights era?
One answer to that – the easy answer – is “America's racist!” Of course it is. There's a deeper answer, though, which goes like this.
Black people haven't made progress because nobody much has.
America is a society in deep, stark decline. Everything that counts is falling. Incomes. Savings. Assets. The softer things having financial security creates. Happiness, trust, meaning, purpose. Political stability is going with them, and violence and instability are breaking out. The result of long-term declines in living standards is chaos.
In a rising society, perhaps, it's possible, sometimes for scapegoated and hated groups to rise to positions of relative equality. That's after they get exploited for their labour as slaves, usually.
Almost never can hated minorities reach positions of greater equality and prosperity.
What did Weimar Germany do to the Jews? Societies in decline punch down on hated minorities. They usually find themselves the greatest relative losers of all. Why is that? Because someone must be blamed, scapegoated, for the problems of the chosen people, the true, the pure-blooded. That someone, too, must be less powerful – after all, that's what a “scapegoat” is. Someone you can sacrifice, for the unity of the tribe.
Who's that, in America today? Who isn't it ?
Mexicans, Latinos, Jews, Muslims. And, of course, blacks. Trumpism is a neo-fascist ideology precisely in that it scapegoats hated minorities for the economic woes of the pure and true.
But the economic woes of the average white American have nothing – nothing – whatsoever to do with black or brown people.
How did the average white American's fall apart? Here's the strange, paradoxical, ironic, twist. Because of racism.
Why did even white American plunge into poverty ?
Because they have to pay astronomical prices for basics like healthcare, education, and retirement, on the one hand, and because their incomes haven't risen since the 1970s, on the other. Bang! That's how they became indebted.
But they have to pay those astronomical prices for basics because they thought something like this: «I won't pay for those dirty, filthy people's healthcare! Their kids' education! Their retirement !»
White Americans refused to make a modern, decent, civilized society.
One of expansive public goods for all – like in Canada or Europe. The result was that they themselves were left indebted and impoverished.
And the consequence of white America falling into poverty was what it usually is.
A vicious cycle of hate erupted. Trumpism arose. A faux-golden haired American Idiot came along, who blamed America's problems on everyone but white Americans. But white Americans had no one, really, to blame, but themselves, and their own foolish choices, for their own growing poverty.
Why did American wages begin to flatline in the early 1970s? American economists act as if this is one of the greatest mysteries in the world. It's not. What else happened at precisely that date? Segregation ended. It's as if the economy had always relied on a pool of cheap black labour to exploit and dehumanize – and once it didn't have it anymore, the economy began to flatline.
That should have been America began to build a decent, civilized, modern society – with things like healthcare and education and retirement for all, not to mention dignity. It should have said: «Wow! The moment we stopped letting blacks being exploited so much – our system just turned around and exploited everyone. It must be built on exploitation. We need to change the system.»
But America didn't do that. It did just the opposite.
The civil rights gains of the 1970s were met with Reagan's counter-revolution. They called it “individual responsibility” and so on, but what it meant was: «I'm not paying for black kids education and healthcare.» What white American didn't understand was that refusal meant they themselves would be denied all those things too. Or maybe they understood it – and they just wanted revenge. Either way, that moment in the 1980s, when white Americans denied themselves the chance to be a civilized society, was the birth of the modern American Idiot.
Because even if they got revenge on those uppity blacks, they themselves were to worse healthcare, education, retirement, too. In the end, they were to have vastly less income, savings, assets, dignity, freedom, too, than people in other rich countries.
Whether white American wanted to take revenge on blacks, or whether they still didn't see them as people – does it really matter, and can't it be both? – that moment sealed America's fate. It was going to collapse. Because a nation without healthcare, retirement, education, for all, is going to be one without dignity, freedom, and justice, too.
A vicious cycle of poverty is going to set in, as people pay outrageous prices for these basics of life they refuse to have at affordable prices for all. Refusing to offer dignity and worth to all, there won't be any for themselves, either.
As they grow impoverished, what always happens will happen.
A demagogue will come along, who blames the woes of the chosen people on... the very hated minorities... who the chosen hated people hated so much…they'd denied themselves the chance at a working society to take revenge on in the first place. Do you see the savage irony? The terrible paradox ?
Racism cost America a working society.
And as white American descended into poverty, it reverted right back to the same old racism, scapegoating everyone else for it's foolish choice to be racist in the first place. You might even say racism is America's curse, in this sense.
And now ?
These protests express hints of all of that. Black people have suffered in terrible shocking, unimaginable ways. The reason they haven't made progress since the 1970s, is that nobody much has, apart from maybe a handful of white billionaires. The people who used to formerly be known as the white working class and middle class are now taking out those resentments, the anger and fury of collapse and poverty, on... every minority under the sun. And black people bear the brunt of that hatred, that rage, that resentment. That is why black man after black man dies, and nothing much changes.
But it's more and worse than that. It's a society which is cursed by racism.
Racism cheated even white Americans of the chance to really enjoy a prosperous, modern, civilized society like Canada or Europe. They grew impoverished and desperate instead. And they took out those frustrations…with even more racism. Electing a Trump, keeping systemic bigotry and oppression alive. America's isn't just racist. America is racist upon racist upon racist – to the point that it reacts to the economic and social disasters wrought by racism with... more racism.
All that is why these protests feel so visceral.
So raw, so real, like they come from a deeper place. Americans of all stripes feel so hopeless. They are beginning to understand the vicious cycle that curses them. Black people understood it long ago. Today, though, perhaps even “real” Americans are beginning to understand all this. The terrible stupidity of America. The impossible moral crime of it. The hopeless folly of sticking to the same old path – hate, retaliation, vengeance. What can come of it? What can you do, except scream in rage, and cry to the heavens ?
The land of the free ?
America is a broken idea, a failed experiment, a thing that doesn't work because it has never worked, an oxymoron, a contradiction, a cruel joke. The home of the brave? Are you kidding me? America has become a place of unbearable degradation. Of a cruelty that can't be suffered longer. Of a brutality that leaves the world astonished – and has long left Americans weary. But now Americans are beginning to see the price, perhaps, of all that cruelty, brutality, exploitation – for a society. Poverty, disgrace, stupidity, folly, ruin. Paralysis. Hopelessness. The feeling that things are terrible, and will never get better.
The sense that this country is now at a dead end. The sense that this country is now at the end.
That is what these protests say. Their message is deep.
Black people understood it first. And they've long tried to teach the rest of us. But who listened to James Baldwin when he needed to be heard? The lesson has been learned too late. Way, way too late. The time America could have been saved was the 80s, maybe. But now? With a lunatic in the White House? A hundred thousand dead and forty million unemployed? With the white formerly middle and working class scapegoating everyone else for their own stupidity, because they can't face the truth of themselves, their own hatefulness and racism ?
Riots erupt when politics, economics, and norms all fail.
Riots like this, that burn a country's great cities down, erupt when all those fail a whole society, for generations. Racism kept the America black down, it's true, and the white on top. But the price, even for the white American, in the end, was poverty, ruin, and despair, too.
Wouldn't you cry out in a terrible, powerless, hopeless frustration at that ?
That paradox? At the sheer mind-boggling idiocy of having made such a self-destructive choice? All that cruelty, brutality, violence – it had resulted in precisely nothing good, positive, useful – for victim or oppressor, both. There's nothing left to express, then, but the anguish of futility. It cuts the soul and leaves the heart broken, the despair of nothingness. You know, at last, what real tragedy is – not just violence, hate, cruelty, but finally, learning the hard way what it always ends in: ruin. And you weep. You have finally learned the price of brutality. It was you.
Who doesn't rage at the jaw-dropping stupidity of what America became ?
Save our souls. Our ship is sinking.
What do we do now? Where do we go? What is to become of us? Do we just eat each other now, to survive, fight each other for spots on the lifeboats ?
As I watched CNN last night, there was an eloquent black man who spoke into the camera. His voice full of both despair and dignity. “We just want to be treated like human beings,” he said. That, it seems to me, is the central message. Save our souls.
These protests are the final tormented death cry of a wounded beast. One called America. Who killed it? It walked off a cliff, chasing a ghost. And there it is now, in the ravine, the abyss, howling, twisting, roaring in pain.
Help us, someone, anyone. We don't know what to do anymore.
SOS. Save our souls.
- Written by Umair Haque - May 2020
Eudaimonia & Co