People experiencing the fallout from COVID-19 are just learning what poor people in America have known for quite some time: that they are totally expendable. Not only to their government, but to their friends, co-workers and neighbors who managed to hang onto their jobs. Many folks were forced to return to unsafe workplaces rather than see their families starve.

And no one can fault them for that.

There is zero help in the US for anyone who falls on hard times regardless of what those hard times might be – it makes no difference if you’re a federal employee, a factory worker or small business owner – the minute you need help you’re suddenly a fucking freeloader trying to ‘game’ the system.

Millions of people have had their brains scrambled by hardship, clinically dumbed-down by FOX News and an insipid culture of shallow consumerism and celebrity worship. They are incapable of feeling empathy for their fellow human beings anymore, or for the planet that nurtures and sustains them.

In many ways, America’s “victory” in the Cold War embedded neoliberal capitalism more deeply and corruptly into an already lax political system. Too many younger Americans have no idea how our exploitative socioeconomic political system works, or what alternatives there might be. They are kept ignorant of the benefits “socialism” could mean for the average worker.

America has never been the Land of Opportunity or the ‘Land of the Free’ for the vast majority of its citizens. It has always been the land where wealth and privilege dealt you all the cards, and that gave you carte blanche to ride roughshod over those less fortunate.

Meanwhile, all the millionaires and billionaires exploit the system; either through inherited wealth or ill-gotten gains. And let’s be honest: billionaires only acquire their wealth through the exploiting of others.

During the Cold War years, the USA got away with this by using the threat of nuclear annihilation to unify the country; but it also gave the government justification for coming down hard on the opposition or support of any other view as being “soft on Communism.”

If the United States wasn’t already broken both socially and economically, it would never have given rise to “president” Donald Trump. Granted, the immediate cause of Trump’s undemocratic victory was certainly the lack of democracy inherent in the Electoral College, but still…

What we have seen so far during the most surreal election in US history could just be the opening salvo in this conflict, and not a one-off aberration – or anything that can be solved simply by removing a particular administration from power.

But honestly, it’s too late. The damage is done. That this election is still too close to call tells the world everything they fear about the real heart of America. That so many people still think that tRump is a great leader is, frankly, terrifying. Everything he stands for is rotten to the core, and yet a huge swathe of America simply doesn’t give a shit.

Money has corrupted every institution in the USA: Politics, the educational system; mainstream media; religious institutions; science, healthcare…literally everything.

America has reached a point where we are unable to address any major issues because its populace has been so thoroughly indoctrinated to a system of beliefs that are dangerously sociopathic: which only serves to protect the status quo. Short of total systemic collapse, meaningful change cannot occur.

Following any such collapse, change may even be for the worst.

WalMart and Target report all stocks of ammunition and firearms exhausted. Nobody believes the theatrics of American democracy anymore, not even the ones participating in it.