Living the American Dream in the United Scams of America. Not.

America is not what it is claimed to be. There is no American dream; it’s an illusion. Even before Donald Dumb came to power and exposed it all: Get the truth from the mouth of babes. He’s no babe but he’s an idiot and his performance, which a majority of Americans approve of, is very telling: He has exposed America for what it REALLY is: a place of conformity, submissiveness, ignorance, totalitarianism, greed, and crime.

Here are some common things in the US that foreigners quickly see and hate, while Americans accept them like manna from heaven. They are told that they have to put up with all sorts of violations of their personal freedom because that’s the price you pay for personal freedom! Can you comprehend that? America is a Gulag in which hundreds of millions of sheep are herded inside virtual concentration camps where they are subjected to the most annoying and aggressive violations of their personal dignity for the purpose of ensuring their fake happiness.

Spam. Seriously. Email, calls, texts — it's just SO MUCH. Just yesterday, I missed a legit call because...who answers numbers they haven't seen before?

I still remember when email was just starting to become a thing, and you would actually email your friends, or you could have pen-pals...it was actually really cool and fun! Now, I get 50 emails a day, and they're all ads. Everyone is trying to scam you or sell you shit."

War on drugs. The US goes to war, topples governments, and rages against smuggling illicit and dangerous drugs across the border. But does anyone ever ask why there is such a demand for illicit and dangerous drugs in the US? Why it is seen as fashionable and cool to do drugs in places like Wall Street and Washington DC, especially among the well-to-do and elite? Why doesn’t the Donald Dumb administration go after the domestic users of all these smuggled drugs? The Moron-in-Chief claims to be a businessman, but he doesn't seem to understand the connection between demand (by Americans for illicit drugs in the US) and supply (from across the southern border).

Commercials for Prescription Drugs. We are probably the only country on the planet where this is allowed. Americans are bombarded day and night with ads promoting dangerous drugs. The citizen in America is not a “citizen” anymore: He/she is a patient, a consumer, a shopper…. The average American, again, is like a brainless sheep that is made to believe anything just so he/she can be bilked of money by corporations. In these drug commercials, the “patient” is told to convince their doctor to prescribe a certain drug or medicine. But this is not how medicine works: The doctor is supposed to prescribe the best possible drug regardless of its brand or all the shiny objects around it. Adding insult to injury, the patient then complains that the drug in question is expensive and  most insurance companies don’t cover it.

Mental sedation. Being one in a herd trained and conditioned by all the corporate scammers and their political appointees in government, the average American lives in a state of sedation in the belief that all these other larger entities are taking care of them. One example that struck me once when I returned to the US from a trip abroad, is when a sudden electricity blackout hit the city where I was. Without red-green lights running traffic at intersections, I watched drivers freeze. They wouldn’t dare go through the intersection (no green, no red) for fear of being ticketed. The mental readiness - the state of alert - that is normally present in each one of us had been taken away from us by a totalitarian system of compliance. Live in the bliss of ignorance: Big Brother is taking care of you. You don't need to think, we do the thinking for you. The basic sense of initiative and alertness that is in each one of us has been deleted.  I knew someone who wouldn't know how to cook rice if they're given a cup of rice. They need to buy the rice in a package with instructions.

Fear of police and corruption. Americans live in a constant state of fear. Fear of government. Fear of corporations. Fear of the law. Fear of the IRS. Fear of the justice system. Driving on a highway in the US is a game of cat and mouse: You are always worried that if you cross the speed limit, there’s a police car hiding somewhere waiting for you. I once was a victim of a state trooper whose girlfriend decided to replace her broken car mirror by making up an accident with me. I had passed her tiny 20-year old beat-up Japanese car with my pick-up truck (there was no way that my big truck could get that close to her mirror) on a county road a couple of miles back, before hitting the highway. She followed me while on her cell phone. Suddenly a state trooper with a French last name (hers was an Italian name) showed up from out of nowhere and stopped me. Alhough he was not on the scene of the so-called accident, he gave me one minute to decide: Either settle it “civilly” (i.e. by admitting to the accident and having my insurance company pay for her mirror), or he’ll take me to jail for a hit-and-run and a criminal offense on my record. I chose the former, of course, coercively.  When I later called my insurance company and told them what happened, they said they won’t investigate and will pay for her mirror. It’s cheaper: Money comes before justice.

Work culture. Another gulag. In corporations, you work your heart out, overtime and on weekends, and for what? For two weeks of vacation and one week of sick days per year. Not to mention the toxic games of pettiness, jealousy and discrimination. 

Rudeness. A general lack of respect for other people in public spaces. Whether it's blasting music in the car with windows down, having phone conversations with the speaker turned on, not using turn signals, or not fully stopping at stop signs, there's just an overall lack of respect for other people. This whole 'it's my world and you're living in it' attitude." Americans imitate the rudeness and filthy behavior they see in Hollywood movies. Sometimes, they break down and imitate the violence and barbarity they see elevated to the status of art in the same movies.

Scams. "I opened a small business a few years ago and was inundated with letters from other companies offering to file basic government paperwork and cover any fees for me for anywhere from $150 to $500 per filing. A few minutes on Google was all it took for each filing, and most of the fees ranged from $5 to $50. I thought that was pretty terrible and exploitative of people who didn’t know better. Just trying to take advantage of those who are busy with a new business. Then, a friend of mine whose father had just passed away told me they got very similar types of letters from companies offering to handle all the filings related to his death. One of them charges almost $1,000 for a filing that took her less than 10 minutes to do and had a fee of like $9. I can’t imagine taking advantage of people’s grief like that."

Ignorance. Literacy rates and the lack of respect towards education and academia. Educators are some of the worst-treated professionals out there and are not even remotely close to being paid what they're owed. Intellectuals and smart people are mocked as “nerds” while brainless sports idiots are stars. And in hand with that — anti-science. Why do people believe half-naked influencers who rant on about seed oils and vaccines causing deaths rather than people who dedicate their lives to science? I don’t get it.

Healthcare in America is an absolute bullshit. Insurance companies hire advertisers to promote the lie that the American healthcare system is the best in the world. They back this bullshit by saying that in places like Canada and the UK and elsewhere, it’s a “socialist” system where you have to wait months before getting surgery. But all over the world, medical care is inexpensive, simple and easy to navigate, and the quality is as good as in the US. In fact, millions of Americans go to third world countries to get their surgeries done fast, cheap and well, instead of navigating the traumatizing nightmare of being caught between the hospital and the insurance company. One “patient” says, "I lined up a surgery with an in-network provider, and the insurance company decided that it was an out-of-network provider four days before my surgery. The irony was that self-pay was $1,000 less than the in-network cost. Out-of-network costs would have cost me about $8,000 more than self-pay. My self-pay cost was 30% of the invoiced amount. It isn't capitalism or socialism or anything reasonable in between. It's just bullshit, as you said."

Public Transportation. Car manufacturers fight tooth and nail to derail any serious improvement of public transportation. A country so large as the US should have fast rail crisscrossing the country north and south and east and west. Japan, France, Germany … all have affordable fast rail that replaces flying and driving. Good for the environment, good for your pockets and your wellbeing. But corporations do everything in their power not to change the current status quo of antiquated and vulnerable infrastructure. Falling bridges, potholed roads….

Macho male culture. “I moved to the UK after spending my whole life in the US. I found that men in the UK were more comfortable with their emotions, openly vulnerable, less aggressive, showed affection for their friends, talked to strangers openly, were funnier, etc. I think we underestimate how toxic the culture in the US can be because we are so used to it." … "I'm a woman from the US, and I went to Ireland on a solo trip a while back; it was glorious. I found people to talk to everywhere I went, and men seemed like they were actually happy just to chat as human beings and be friendly and respectful. There wasn't this weird overtone of 'if you're not going to sleep with me, you're wasting my time.'"

The complexity of our tax code. Specifically designed to terrify you and send you to greedy middlemen called tax advisors and accountants. I like this way someone described how the government and the IRS deal woith the taxpayer: "We know what you owe, but we aren’t going to tell you. You have to figure it out for yourself, and if you get it wrong, we fine you or throw you in jail."

No consumer protection. The average US “consumer” is left at the mercy of financial scammers. Instead of doing something serious to eradicate the problem, it is allowed to fester: phone calls, e-mails, letters from scamming companies….trying to get you to give them the personal information they need to steal your bank account or open a credit card in your name and burden you with debt. As this epidemic has become a pandemic, you are instructed on highly technical ways to avoid falling prey. It’s your job to protect yourself, the government won’t protect you because if it did, it would have to fight the same companies that fund their election campaigns.

Worship of the military under the fake pretense of patriotism. “I'm a veteran, and I'm even annoyed by it. Veterans don’t get proper support. Donald Dumb called them “suckers and losers” for risking their lives for their country. Bob Dylan once said, “join the army if you fail”. It’s not all patriotism: A lot of it is getting a secure job and health care at the risk of losing your life. A Faustian deal.

Conformity, Compliance in a totalitarian system: The Pledge of Allegiance. It's creepy that we make our kids say it every day before school, like we’re in North Korea or something. And dare you refuse! Fucking freedom!

There is so much more to enumerate here. But I am getting depressed thinking our stupid we are to accept to live in what someone once called “America is the third world of the first world”. It is rich in the bank, but it is poor on street level. And now with Donald Dumb, we are really a third world country, a banana republic run by an absolute dictator.