That’s not a bad rant right there.
It’s increasingly clear that our flag-waving national hubris is long past its “best used by” date. We’ve wasted a lot of our advantage and potential the last five decades or so and the “We’'re Number 1” people have prevented us from taking an adult approach to our many shortcomings.
I feel there is a fair amount of truth in that. We “suck” in the sense that a significant number of Americans view our particular brand of “suckiness” as a virtue. For example:
The other day, some of my Facebook friends were commenting on a Bernie Sanders repost on how the wealth of American’s 700+ billionaires is something like $4.5 trillion and how some of that could be used to address the $1.5 trillion in student debt. Of course, conservatives were outraged at the notion that those ultra-wealthy should have their taxes increased to pay for public services (whether it’s education, roads, health care or whatever). Idiotic comments like “everything has a cost” or “there’s no free lunch”.
The point is that you are correct. The reason we suck is because too many people believe in the fiction that “freedom” is the right to be a selfish jerk with no regards for anyone or anything besides one’s own wealth accumulation. So people embrace those qualities in our policy-makers and business leaders, with expected results.
I think a bigger factor that might lead to depression and suicide is that most of these people don’t want to BE poor and unproductive. I mean I guess no one wants to be poor, but my sense is that these are mostly people with a strong work ethic who find themselves out of work due to economic circumstances beyond their control which they largely don’t understand. These also tend to be the sort of people who don’t like to tolerate a lot of “weakness”. The sort who believe serving in the military “makes a man out of you” or that people should just “toughen up” and “work harder”. So when they find themselves out of work, I guess their mind just sort of snaps. They can’t reconcile the two opposing concepts.
It’s not just the “I’m out of work” thing…
It when they’ve been told since childhood that if they do everything right they’ll be fine, and the poor at the bottom of society are there because they didn’t make the right choices, do the right thing, work hard enough, etc. So when these folks wind up on the bottom, too, even though they DID do everything right, they feel completely and utterly betrayed. Not “I was out of a job for a month before I found a new one” but rather “I was out of a job for a year and could only find minimum wage work and I can’t get a better one no matter how hard I work and I’m losing everything I’ve worked so hard to get and dammit I DID EVERYTHING RIGHT HOW COULD THIS BE HAPPENING TO ME?!?!?!” The “magic” of being in the privileged class doesn’t work for them anymore, because they just discovered that they are NOT part of the elite and the elite views them as just as disposable as anyone else beneath the elite.
Yup. And the standard way to fix that problem in a democracy is to band together with the rest of the non-eite to change the system so that it works better for non-elites in general, even if that ends up costing the elites a little more in taxes.
But American elites have been assiduously schooling white American non-elites for decades, if not centuries, NOT to make common cause with their non-white peers. Systemic racism is the best thing that ever happened for American plutocracy.
Yep. I mean that’s not an unreasonable expectation is it? It’s one thing if you drop out of high school and have no marketable skills. But if you go into massive debt to get the education and training they tell you that you’ll need to be successful in the workplace and you still can’t find a job?
It has nothing to do with being “part of the elite”, aside from society said “these are the jobs that pay well and here are the skills and education we look for when hiring for those jobs”. Then suddenly after years of training and education and work experience, those jobs disappeared and that experience isn’t valuable anymore.
So yeah, I can see how people would be angry and depressed because suddenly that career or even just that decent job at the local plant they’ve been preparing for just suddenly disappeared so some shareholder’s stock could go up quarter of a point. Particularly if they don’t have the luxury of extra wealth squirreled away.
Yeah.
I mean, I’ve been done out of two careers already in my life, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it happens again. I was angry and depressed both times. BUT - despite how White I look and sound I’ve always been two of the lesser categories: female and Jewish. I never had any illusion that they system was set up in MY favor even if I had some advantages others didn’t (such as being able to pass for White at times).
But if you grew up all your life with the Magic Shield of I’m not one of THOSE people! and you suddenly find out that, yes you are, you are one of THOSE losers, that you’ve been lied to all of your life, that all your blood sweat and tears have been a lie, stolen from you and used to benefit others who will kick you in the teeth when you’re down… What do you do? There are several possibilities, but definitely “kill a bunch of people” or “kill yourself” are on the list.
Now, instead of JUST factories shutting down, the middle class being gutted, and promises of jobs broken we get stuff like the media on the Rabid Right have decreed that all those loyal, White, Christian, Republicans that stormed the Capitol on January 6 were actually not True White Christian Republicans but rather “Antifa” or “Black Lives Matter” or “immigrants” or whatever demon cover can be slammed over them because those “little Republicans” didn’t succeed at what their masters wanted, the overthrow of the will of the other “little people”. All those little loyal soldiers are going to be left to twist in the wind, and even then some of them will not believe that they’ve been betrayed. It’s all the True Republican Conservatives gasping their last as covid-19 destroys their lungs and ends their lives, their last words But I can’t dying of covid, it’s all a hoax because Fox/Trump/Limbaugh/OAN told me so!
Before, it was always the Other People who were crushed, killed, and destroyed by the overlords. NOW they’re starting to grind down the Loyal Little White Soldiers. And of course the overlords WANT the 2nd amendment unfettered and everyone armed - because then the peasants will kill each other while the super-wealthy and super-powerful can stay safe in their gated communities surrounded by the private little armies to keep them safe from the rabble.
Gosh, that went dark, didn’t it? Sorry, but that’s how I see it.
So yeah, some of those who figure out the game, how they’ve been fooled and lied to and betrayed, lash out. Sometimes they only kills themselves, sometimes they take other people with them.
I think maybe @Broomstick and @I_Love_Me_Vol.I should work a little together offline on a back-and-forth duet rant. Kinda like when Lou Rawls and Roberta Flack did Tonight I Celebrate my Love. It’d be a big hit around here.
You’re both off to a great start with this one.
Tonight I Celebrate the Suck
All apologies, but: Peabo Bryson.
YOU RUNINED THE MOOD!!! 
Edited to add: TRULY, U R TEH SUXXOR!
D’oh!
In addition to Peabo & Lou, at the same time I was also looking at Marvin Gaye with Tammi Terrell and a couple other less famous lead singer pairs that did duet work, trying to find the pair that best fit our local duo here. Switching back and forth between searching by the woman vs the man. Eventually I had about 15 tabs open. Took about an hour to finish listening to all of them and the other stuff each tab spun off before I got far away enough to close that tab and work the next. YouTube is like that for me.
Somewhere along the way I must’ve gotten the pairings mixed up. Oops. Thanks for the cleanup
To be honest, I’m just disappointed that I can’t hear the never-was Rawls version — the prospect of which, as I read your post, made me think, oh, yeah, that probably would’ve been better.
What I want most to do
Is to talk ‘suck’ with you
Tonight.
Peabo was great on this one, but the mere fact that it wasn’t who we thought it was or who we wanted it to be is prima facie evidence of just how much we suck.
QED
I don’t know about that “magic shield” stuff. I think it’s all part of a culture of “toxic individuality” which makes most Americans feel like they are in constant competition with everyone and everything in order to achieve what is considered to be the traditional “American Dream”.
I feel like this is a relatively recent phenomenon. When I look at people of my dad’s generation, they mostly didn’t ever have to deal with this stuff. For a lot of them, all they had to do was sell industrial machinery or work in the back office of a bank for 30 years and retire a millionaire.
I don’t have extensive data handy but a quick Google revealed that about 7 out of 10 suicides are committed by white males. This is consistent with my own personal experience: I’ve known probably 10 or more people who’ve committed suicide throughout my life. All were white males, and if it means anything, all except for one were from the Deep South. The one exception had schizophrenia.
There might be a racial component to suicide but not in the sense that the OP laid out. I suspect that what is driving most suicides is a sense of failure, which is probably set up by a sense of entitlement that operates invisibly at the subconscious level. In each case I can remember, the suicides were driven either by a social trigger (a breakup) or a combination of perceived social and financial failure. White men, being at the top of the socioeconomic pyramid so to speak probably take failure harder than someone who might not grow up assuming that they are entitled to a middle class level of wealth and security. A broken marriage or staggering debts due to financial mismanagement is going to be bad for anyone, whether it’s a man or woman, or black man or a white man. But the disparity between where a white man believes he should be or expects to be, and where he ends up when the realization of failure sets in, is probably a little greater.
But then we also come back to the issue of guns. In my experience, and I’m fairly sure the data shows this as well, white males also tend to own firearms at higher rates than the rest of the population. I also suspect that in most cases, another deadly factor is substance abuse, particularly alcohol. White males tend to engage in riskier drinking habits and activities.
All of that is to say, it appears that suicide in the US is mostly committed by white men, who start down that road by experiencing the shock of failing to live up to their own expectations before medicating themselves with alcohol or drugs and ultimately killing themselves with their firearm.
One thing I would agree with the OP on is that if we had a better safety net and economic policies that protected people from falling too far down into a whole, we might be able to reduce suicide rates. But beyond that, we’d probably need to do something about guns, and ironically, the ones who end up killing themselves with their own guns were probably people who don’t want to be barred from buying one.
It’s too late for us. We need to turn our attentions to the younger generations and continue to urge them to increase the safety nets and repeal the Second Amendment. They’ll have the power.
Yes, I went there.
Another offering from my litany of pithy sayings – one that I think bears on the OP:
The American Dream: working too hard at a job you can’t stand, in order to buy no end of shit that you really don’t need, basically in an effort to keep up with people you don’t particularly like.
I call it The Treadmill.
It breaks decent people.
Back in the day it was the Rat Race. I prefer “the Grind”.
You know, as a white male member of Gen-X, I don’t know that we ever had a particular rosey view of what the future was going to look like. If you told me in my 20s that in the future America was going to be on the verge of tearing itself apart, ravaged by pandemics and racial conflicts, suffering frequent economic collapse, controlled by technocratic global megacorporations, and led by someone like Donald Trump…well I probably would have believed you.
There are many reasons so many Americans are anxious and depressed (potentially leading to suicide) but mostly they all fall under the umbrella of a culture of “toxic individuality”:
That’s just off the top of my head.