Monsters are real, and so is your stress

I know you are scared, anxious, and afraid. So am I.

I wish I could tell you everything will be OK. Maybe it will. That’s not up to me. It is up to those few and far between who are paying attention. The ones willing to fight for a world where everyone matters. Where everyone is given the basics they need to survive, and thrive.

That’s not the history of the human species. But it can be the future of the human species. If we are collectively willing to stand up and tell the ones who claim authority over us their time in power is over. A world order reboot is required.

Change can happen. In America, it is long overdue. As much as I want to love my adopted country, I am also aware that it was founded on slavery and male white privilege. Joe Biden isn’t the answer. Donald Trump is even less the answer. The American two-party system is toxic and this country is eating itself.

The privileged have designed the system this way. The ultra-wealthy are also the ultra-powerful. Power corrupts. Human history proves this over and over. I live in the United States as a naturalized citizen who served in two branches of the military. I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to make it all make sense.

Only recently have I come to understand that I live in a system designed to keep me scared, anxious, and afraid. The system’s in-built cruelty is genius if you happen to have been born into privilege and wealth. Here is how it works: design structures of power that keep the majority of people fighting other groups of people so that they exhaust themselves without realizing it is the one percent at the top pulling the strings. Manipulating the world to ensure they stay on top.

Donald Trump is a master of this game. Despite being an outsider to the one percent, Trump is a useful puppet. He peddles hate and cruelty to the ignorant masses effectively. His forte is to keep the tribalism of self-defeat alive. Which ensures the order of things lasts a few years longer while the vast majority of us non-billionaires march headlong into extinction.

The billionaires will go extinct too. They are too arrogant and power-addicted to care about that. Malignant narcissism is just as blind as any other mental fish bowl.

Trump is only useful as long as he continues to distract the disaffected cult of ignorance and impotent rage he has encouraged. Donald Trump and today’s Republican Party represent unhinged and unrestrained cruelty. This is a group of people who feel they are authorized by their mad godmanking to: own your choices over beliefs, behaviors, bodies, and most importantly breeding and brains. Gilead is just around the bend if we do not fight by any means necessary. If you are not familiar with Gilead, it is a fictional patriarchal society where white men hold all positions of power and authority. Women are denied access to higher education, property ownership, and many other basic rights. The society is structured to control and subjugate women, emphasizing traditional gender roles and religious fundamentalism. Think Taliban in Afghanistan, circa 2024.

Trump is the symptom, not the disease. Peter Theil is the disease. Bill Gates is the disease. Warren Buffett is the disease. Billionaires are the stress monsters living rent-free in our heads. The rent for our lives keeps going up. More and more of us exist hand to mouth in a manufactured state construct that is purpose-designed to keep us struggling enough that we cannot see reality. And so, we die blind and ignorant wondering what it was all about. Without seeing our own species’ self-immolation just around the bend.

I am willing to sacrifice my own being for a different outcome. I like the idea that after I am gone, children will still wake up with hope and joy when they contemplate making a world full of beauty. Devoid of Uber-privilege and monstrous cruelty.

It is OK to be afraid. It is not OK to be apathetic. Stand for something, or amount to nothing while the usual suspects eat everything all the while claiming it is their birthright.

Reboot before it is too late.