Land of the Free, Home of the Incarcerated

TL; DR: I love my country, but we are not Number One. Western democracy's in trouble right now, but we're going to pull it together; we'll get through this, somehow.

Still playing around with different AI text-to-image programs.

You know what I thought about for the first time the other day?

In Emma Lazarus' poem "The New Colossus," famously inscribed on a plaque on the Statue of Liberty, the narrator exalts this torch-bearing "Mother of Exiles," who cries, "Give me your huddled, your poor, / Your tired masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore."

She never makes any promises about what happens to them once they get here, though.

***

I am a patriot, albeit a pained one, these days.

I grew up surrounded by proud, small-town Americans who by and large embodied our country's values of self-reliance, innovation, hard work, and lending a hand. I believed wholeheartedly in our national myths: That our leaders from the Founding Fathers on down were a different breed from most countries', that they embodied our values and held themselves to a higher standard; that the American Dream was real, that anyone could become anything; that we were a cultural melting pot whose success derived in large part from the hybrid vigor of our diversity.

As I entered middle school, I began to question (almost) everything, from my Roman Catholicism to my sexual orientation to whether my parents and the rest of my family were the people I'd thought they were.

As I've written about elsewhere, one of my first (of very few) acts of political participation was sneaking around town with my friend Peter, slipping pamphlets about civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan underneath the windshield wipers on parked cars. Hundreds of thousands of innocents were dying in Iraq, I learned, as part of a conflict that might very well have originated in the Bush family's thirst for oil as much as any chemical weapons manufactured or used by the Hussein regime.

My doubt was nurtured and embraced; I grew up around thinkers, questioners.

If I were a mother in Iraq, I'd be walking into an American military base with a bomb strapped to my body, too, my mom said one day.

I knew what she meant.

In some ways, my relationship with my country has been mostly heartbreak from middle school onward. I know that my questioning of what being American meant to me as my worldview became more sophisticated can't be unique to me, and nor can it be a uniquely American phenomenon, of course. But partly because of how romanticized and idealistic my view of my country was to begin with, and partly because I've always experienced my emotions as so hurricane-like, with so little of me to spread around and contain them, my waking up to reality hit me hard.

I'd always found the "We're Number One" slogan to be in extraordinarily cringey taste. In my heart of hearts, though, I had grown up believing it.

***

Even if the United States isn't Numero Uno, we still had (have?) to be toward the top of the list, right?

Apropos of nothing the other day, I was thinking about whether I could still honestly assert that the United States is one of the greatest countries in the world.

I kept coming back to one essential fact: American exceptionalism cuts both ways.

As I acknowledged in my 2024 Fourth of July reflections, during our 250-ish years as a nation, the United States has contributed as much world-changing leadership, culture, and technology as any country in history.

From Universal Studios' colossal amusement park in Beijing and photos of Marilyn Monroe above the urinals in bar bathrooms in rural China to medicines and vaccines that have cured deadly diseases the world round; from the bottom of the ocean to the surface of the moon and back, the U.S. has made its mark.

However, so much of what we and our allies enjoy is built upon the loss, suffering, and exploitation of others.

In Narco-Karma, I considered the consequences of the United States' insatiable demand for chemical escape. Though we are only 4.2% of the world's population, we consume over 35% percent of the world's cocaine. Our fiendish appetites fund entire economies built on drug manufacturing and distribution in countries like Colombia and Mexico, where our guns are used to kill more innocents who get caught in the crossfire between corrupt governments and feuding criminal organizations. In the Middle East and Southeast Asia, too, American drug hunger puts money in the pockets of the worst sorts of actors.

Across the world, children die so that Americans can get high.

In 2013, Americans consumed 100 billion dollars' worth of illegal drugs; we are far and away the world's largest market for them. And yet we also lead the failed War on Drugs, which, as I frequently assert, is the most catastrophic global policy failure in human history.

Our dependence upon and abuse of legal ways to get high is equally dire. Our Food and Drug Administration, which is run by Machiavellian actors who enjoy a revolving door between regulatory positions in government and executive roles with Big Pharma companies, has repeatedly failed to appropriately restrict the sales of addictive pharmaceuticals.

The Sackler family, which initiated our current opioid epidemic by creating OxyContin, a high-dose formulation of a high-potency and exceptionally addictive opioid whose time-release mechanism was defective, has faced no criminal prosecution despite demonstrably, intentionally fueling opioid addiction while concealing the fact that they were poisoning our nation.

Since 1999, more than one million Americans have died of drug overdoses. This is more than all of the American soldiers who have died in battle during all of the wars we've fought since the end of the Revolutionary War.

That's one hell of a war, during which the American government has transformed disease into moral defect and made enemies of its own people - often its most marginalized, downtrodden, and vulnerable.

For the first time since we have tracked such statistics, drug overdoses have replaced car collisions and similar accidents as the number one cause of mortality in individuals aged 18-25. Young adults in their late teens and early twenties are dying of end-stage liver disease, complications of obesity, suicide, and other so-called "deaths of despair" at rates never before seen in our country.

Our nation's soul is sick, and we can hardly seem to acknowledge it, yet alone to agree upon why or to come up with a plan for fixing it. My deepest fear is that we can't come to terms with it because we know deep down that it's already too late.

It's not just our country's soul that is sick, either. We spend more per person on healthcare than any other country. We supposedly have the best physicians, the most advanced medical technologies, and yet we rank last in healthcare outcomes compared to other high-income countries.

Last place. We take worse care of our mentally and physically ill than any other country with comparable resources.

Medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy nationwide.

The situation is so dire that, during a time of unprecedented sociopolitical polarization, Americans were finally able to agree on something when Luigi Mangione, a University of Pennsylvania grad with a bad back, gunned down United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson as he left his luxe hotel in Midtown Manhattan - leaving behind bullet casings imprinted with the words "deny," "defend," and "depose," three principles that summarized the company's shady legal strategy.

What did we finally agree upon? That Luigi Mangione was a hero for killing this not-so-innocent man. That it was about time for someone to do something.

And as we flipped on our TVs to watch the story develop, we were treated to commercial breaks featuring advertisements for Big Pharma's next wonder drugs (the U.S. and New Zealand are the only two countries on Earth that allow direct-to-public marketing of prescription drugs; the FDA, needless to say, does not review such advertisements - and it wouldn't matter if they did).

Our politicians don't want to make it better. Our parties are two wings of the same diseased, flightless eagle, and they are all too happy with 49% of our country convinced that the other 49 percent is insane or idiotic or both. This allows them to rotate in and out of power every election cycle or two, pointing their fingers at the mistakes of the exiting party so that in the end they change little but their own bank account balances.

Oh, and speaking of those bank accounts? The United States has a widening wealth gap, which represents the highest wealth inequality of the G7 nations. Our top 10% commands more than 67% of the country's wealth; the bottom 50% control less than 4%. Continuing this stratified analysis, the top 1% in the U.S. controls an astonishing 30.9% of the country's wealth.

Our once-thriving middle class is vanishing as we approach the end of the globalized, corporatized Monopoly game.

Speaking of corporatization, whereas individual citizens are limited to no more than $3300 in contributions to any given federal political candidate's campaign, corporations can establish PACs that funnel millions into the coffers of favored candidates. Under the doctrine of corporate personhood, our Supreme Court has accorded corporations some of the same legal rights and protections as individuals, a disastrous misstep that is so derisible that it's difficult to say out loud.

Guess who the politicians are more worried about pleasing - private citizens or corporations?

Let's not even start on the impact of U.S. colonialism and U.S.-instigated wars; it is almost too much to bear.

And the one singular, inescapable fact that I keep returning to when I ask myself whether I can continue to believe that the United States is still one of the greatest countries on Earth: That, as I write now, have written before, and will continue to write until I die or the situation changes, the U.S. now incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation on Earth save for perhaps North Korea - the majority of them for drug-related crimes that never should have been criminalized in the first place.

We preferentially lock up poor people, people of color, desperate addicts whose prescription drug supplies have been cut off and who cannot stand the torture of withdrawal. We've executed people so developmentally disabled that they could not write their own names and so psychotic that they believed that they were already dead and being tortured by demons in Hell.

It is a vicious insanity that we still refer to our country as the Land of the Free: We smear sh*t in our own faces every time we repeat this lie.

One of my deepest political convictions is that, were Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers to wake up today, the nation that would greet them would be much closer to a realized nightmare than any future that they had hoped for or predicted for our country.

No wonder we need some chemical help falling asleep at night and then getting up and chasing after that elusive American Dream the next morning.

The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave...

Here, have a poodle. Ti Qi, one of God's most refined and singular creations, is here pictured bonding with my Egyptian friend Shady, who played a pretty big role in my life in Shenzhen.

And, speaking of China, writing an article like this about the CCP under President Xi would likely be a serious problem for any Chinese person who attached their real name to it. The freedom to speak the truth is crucial - so long as we have the freedom and power to follow up on that in meaningful ways to change things, too.

I hate to just doompost and leave everyone with a bad taste in their mouths; it's so easy to get overwhelmed by the negativity these days, and I find myself shutting down / tuning out current events altogether as a result. After this, I won't be mentioning political topics for a long while (unless they relate to methadone regulations).

Life is good. People are beautiful. Humanity has been through fire since day one, and - though the stakes are higher now because we've created much more efficient ways of destroying our planet and each other - we're going to pull together and get through this somehow. I believe in a future where we can all win together, and I hope that I can stay healthy, brave, and buoyant enough to help realize it.