The American Nightmare

The American Dream, historically available moreso to people of a particular demographic to begin with, has given way to a nightmare of a life where almost every waking moment is devoted to labor, either to serve a likely abusive employer for pay or to address practical needs like cooking and cleaning in one's "free" time.  The glaring exception is the life of someone who is already wealthy enough to not need to work or has the right connections to bypass the scrambling of the standard American seeking more accessible employment.  Hard workers can be overlooked as it is, but even those who work hard might be trapped within the almost insurmountable pitfalls of the contemporary minimum wage, one of the worst obstacles to upward economic mobility.  Entirely apart from the exact concrete numbers within a given established economy, the concept of an unlivable minimum wage is logically invalid: there is no basis for requiring a minimum wage that does not really guarantee a baseline level of financial security for the full-time worker.

Still, the conrete numbers are astonishingly inadequate.  Though some states have their own respective minimum wage, the federal minimum wage remains at $7.25.  Working 40 hours a week only earns an abysmal $290 at this rate, falling short of even $300 for a single week.  If someone worked 40 hours every week, with absolutely no absent days due to sickness they can scarcely afford to remedy anyway, they would barely cross the threshold of $15,000.  Suppose that their rent is only $1,000 a month and not higher, as is not uncommon.  Not only would monthly rent or a mortgage likely eat through the majority of their monthly and annual pay, if not all of it, but securing an apartment, heralded as the more accessible option compared to buying a home, is often locked behind a ridiculous and arbitrary requirement.  Prospective renters must usually show evidence that they make three times the cost of rent on a monthly basis.  How the fuck is someone receiving $7.25 an hour supposed to be able to afford this?  And even though employers can and often have paid more than the federal minimum wage just to hire workers, it takes a great deal more than $7.25 to be remotely livable.

For asinine reasons, some look down on the people who make a minimum or generally low wage rather than regard those who oppress them with anger, hostility, and contempt.  Fallacious reasons for this abound, including the idea that anyone who makes minimum wage must be lazy or all but subhuman.  In a mere 15 minutes, I make more than the federal minimum hourly wage, and the cost of living—not the cost of spending extravagantly on luxuries unrelated to health and physical survival, but that of basic living—can still be frustrating.  It would be far more devastating for the poor, such as those working a minimum wage job with little to no savings.  If people have a right to life, as the conservatives who often oppose minimum wage updates insist (and as is Biblical to an extent), they have the inflexible moral right to have access to affordable life necessities like housing and food in exchange for their full-time labor.

Certainly, capitalism does not inherently require that people be denied such things; American-style hyper-capitalism does.  Yet many people reject capitalism itself as if has only one logically possible form, or they revere America's form of it.  Why might someone revere this system and the philosophy that underpins it?  They might be content for people to suffer not for the sake of justice or laziness, but to ensure greater corporate profits and thus a "thriving" economy, or perhaps they might be fortunate enough to not be as directly impacted by the worst of American capitalism and fallaciously conclude that there must be nothing wrong, because they are not the ones suffering.  Alternatively, whether poor or not, they might be hopeful that one day they will somehow be the ones in the billionaire's seat.

Sometimes, the same fools who champion America's hellscape version of capitalism will pay lip service to the Biblical God.  But would they mandate that farmers leave crops at the edges of their field and not return through their fields or vineyards a second time so that vulnerable people like the poor can eat freely, as Yahweh requires (Leviticus 19:9-10, 23:22, Deuteronomy 24:19-21)?  Would they acknowledge that money cannot be the highest priority of one's life if one is aligned with God, as Matthew 6 states?  Do they acknowledge that the love of money can lead someone to indulge in any kind of evil, as Paul does in 1 Timothy 6:10?  No, a great number of people who claim adherence to Christianity are slaves to consumerism, classism, and economic exploitation of others.  They do not and are likely to never even attempt to actually live out what Judeo-Christianity prescribes towards the poor.  They seemingly want the poor to be present to make themselves feel more accomplished, less lazy, and more worthy of whatever wealth they have deprived others of through unbiblical means.

The American Nightmare is not their concern because they benefit from its machinations and they do not care for logical or morality, only for self-gain.  Such delusional slaves to the social construct of money, and to oppressing people even if they are logically and morally in the wrong, could only be hypocrites of an extraordinary degree—thinking they earned all of their wealth when they acquired some of it through unfairly depriving others, thinking they are aligned with a God who would extinguish their lives in Gehenna for disregarding the poor, and (probably) thinking they are rational despite fallaciously living for a social construct rather than sheer logical truth.  What philosophically inept, damnable fools these insects are.