We Could Have Nice Things
But greedy billionaires are why we don't
(An explainer cartoon)
The ever-hilarious, always-insightful Josh Johnson starts one of his best routines with:
“Visiting another country, and seeing how they operate, is like going to a functional family’s house for dinner.”
Most Americans, and nearly all non-rich residents of red states, never get to sit at that functional dinner table. Like people from dysfunctional families, who see substance abuse, violence and deprivation as “just the way life is,” they learn to view crappy or nonexistent public services, medical bankruptcy, and predatory financial systems as normal.
It’s not that most of us don’t see the way our lives are getting worse, it’s that we don’t see the heavy forged chain that connects our lives of student loans and medical debt with Jeff Bezos’ life of mega yachts and space tourism. It’s always cheaper for billionaires to buy congress people and fund disinformation empires than it is to pay a reasonable tax rate, thus, America is full of powerful, well-paid influencers whose only job is to lie to us constantly about why we’re suffering. Depending on our station in life, the answer is either “those other, even worse-off people!” or “you didn’t do absolutely everything perfectly!”
(More on that in a future explainer)
I hope that this explainer (print and distribute, please!) might in some small way, affect people who see it tucked between the pages of their Aldi circular, the way Josh Johnson’s invitation to a functional family dinner affected him. We don’t know what we’re missing until we see what’s possible.
So herewith…
