politics

Right now, our social fabric as a country is really frayed. We have terrible safety nets. Our ability to get healthcare is tied to our jobs (some states now are trying to implement or have implemented work requirements for Medicaid, making even that now depend on employment). Many Americans are a missed paycheck away from losing housing. Our stagnating minimum wages are making it hard for a lot of people in fields with a lower barrier to entry to build up savings, and people in traditionally high paying tech fields are seeing the encroaching threat of AI. It's incredibly easy for employers to fire people in most places, with only a few protected categories that you can't be fired for, and those you'd have to prove in court against an employer in a lawsuit, needing either to find a lawyer who'll work on commission or pay up front in hopes of winning the wrongful dismissal suit, assuming you have the money for it in the first place.

Our housing supply has been badly outpaced by the demand for housing, and also large corporations are buying up swathes of housing to rent out to people at the highest rates they can get away with, while building new housing is expensive, often tied up in red tape, and rarely accessible to the average person as a result. Zoning in many places also locks people into specifically low density single-family homes, which are one of the most expensive and inefficient ways of building housing, making it harder for people to find starter homes and also making people dependent on cars, another expense that tends to put people in debt, worsen dependency on oil due to cars mostly being internal combustion and electric cars being more expensive, worsen public health for similar reasons (making healthcare access even more important, making people even more dependent on their jobs) and something which makes life even harder for folks who have a disability which makes driving impossible or requires expensive vehicle modifications.

Our food system is a mess. Many people live in food deserts where reliable access to fresh produce requires transportation long distances, and local options are mostly shelf-stable ultra-processed foods which do not fill most people's nutritional needs on their own. These foods are profitable for large corporations which use their influence to affect public health policy to keep people dependent on these foods, prevent regulation of potentially harmful ingredients, and bury studies that show the harms of these foods. Cooking at home takes time, energy, and access to affordable ingredients that people in food deserts working three jobs to keep the lights on often just do not have.

Public schools have often experienced funding cuts leading to staffing cuts leading to school lunch being prepared using limited fresh ingredients (particularly fruits and non-starchy vegetables), ultra-processed foods and minimum labor, often by third parties due to the lack of on-site kitchens, making it hard for schools to afford to change this if they want to. This may be the only meal a day kids from impoverished families get. If their parents have any problems with the paperwork for free school lunch and fall into lunch debt, these meals may be taken away from their child and replaced with a sunflower seed butter sandwich. The federal school lunch program heavily pushes dairy as well, so good luck to lactose intolerant kids, who might get a carton of soy milk instead but probably not. (Lactose intolerance rates are higher in African-American, Native American and Latine populations, of course.)

Public schools are frequently under-funded, and are funded primarily by property taxes for the school district, meaning that public schools in areas where people are already disproportionately impacted by poverty are going to have lower funds, contributing to lower quality school meals, fewer resources, fewer teachers with larger classes, and generally as a result less effective education. Private and charter schools may come in, but of course may charge for the education of their students (making it inaccessible to many), and often have substantially fewer regulations and anti-discrimination rules, allowing them to wield their power to effect desired agendas. Many are specifically religious and will teach their students according to the specific religious interpretation of those running it. Do they choose to interpret the Bible as forbidding same-sex relationships and identifying as anything but the gender you were assigned at birth? Fucking sucks for you, queer students!

And speaking of people pushing their preferred reading of their preferred religion from a position of power, we have lost huge amounts of third places, such that for many people, their only real available third place for in-person socialization is their local church. Don't share a religion with most of your neighbors? Sucks to be you. Differ in interpretation of a shared religious text from your local church? Sucks to be you. These churches have an outsized influence on local communities, and in many rural and predominantly white places in the US, they are pushing a specific version of white Christian Nationalism passed down from the top by influential rich folks who subscribe to those beliefs. And because of the gutting of social safety nets, a lot of local churches or religious organizations are the main option for seeking assistance with things. Trans? Muslim? Good luck with your local Salvation Army and their discriminatory policies.

I could go on long enough to write a damn book. Social media created by billionaires, optimized to be addictive and lock people in to their services even as they enshittify, have become one of the few other options for socializing, and are constantly pushing misinformation that serves a fascist Christian white nationalist agenda. Journalistic sources both local and national are being bought up by billionaires turning the reported news to their own agenda. Public funding for scientific research is being cut, leading to scientists relying on private grants to continue their research, allowing -- surprise surprise -- billionaires to exert outsized influence on who gets to practice science and what they research. Municipalities are collapsing under the financial weight of inordinately expensive car-centric infrastructure that they cannot afford, leading to them cutting more services and municipalities with predominantly impoverished residents especially struggling.

I barely even touched on the ways that sexism, racism, ableism, anti-queer discrimination, xenophobia and our broken migration system (broken in the sense that under-resourcing of immigration courts and absurd laws make it a long and difficult process for migrants to obtain legal residency and citizenship, leading to many migrants being left without documents and thus vulnerable to exploitation and further targeting by ICE) amplify these things and make them worse, nor how they divide people and make working class solidarity more difficult, nor how Imperialism and the Imperial boomerang affect things, nor our police system that actively incentives officers to act in harmful ways and prevents accountability, nor a million other things because everything is just too damn much. I literally forgot to even mention the US making war on Iran! Oh, the Epstein files! Voter suppression and gerrymandering!! Gun violence!!!

So frankly, it is a Goddamn miracle that despite all of this, people are organizing. It is a testament to the resiliency and endurance of humanity that Minnesota is organizing against ICE. It is beautiful that people are organizing national strikes, and that the numbers are slowly growing. It is heroic that people are forming mutual aid groups and building local power and building food and housing security.

I won't say there aren't a lot of American people who suck. People voted Trump in, twice, and many of his voters are actively celebrating his cruelty, while the remainder are like "oh, I didn't like the cruelty, but I thought he would be good for the economy," which, okay, "I'm only overlooking The Horrors because money!" isn't much of an excuse. A lot of working class Trump voters have been shaped by webs of disinformation and targeted manipulation that make them vote against their own interests, and I have a sliver of sympathy for that, but actively choosing to support or ignore the horrors being inflicted upon the vulnerable by this government is simply bad. They are choosing to do bad things.

So yeah, some of the American people do suck. But it's not most of us. Our society is broken, and it's going to take incredible work to fix it. So I don't see "the weakness of the American society has led to this" as a damnation of our people nor a downplaying of what so many are doing to fix it; I see it as a descriptor of the problem, in hopes of helping realize the solution.

Anyway, thank you for coming to my TED talk. Support your local mutual aid network. Start a garden. Advocate for housing reform in your community. Do something so that you know you are a part of the solution, and do not try to do everything, because you will burn out and this can only be fixed by rebuilding our society as a group, not a single individual fixing everything.