POLITICS

America the Inexcusable

You can’t make it great again if it never really was

Chris Zappa
5 min readJul 7, 2022

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Statue of Liberty
Photo by Aliaksei Skreidzeleu via Canva

Last week, a man, his wife, and their four children drove from Canada into rural Washington state to visit family. Within three hours of entering the United States, the man hears a loud sound and feels some sort of impact with his vehicle.

Initially, he thinks it may be a tire blowout. He immediately pulls over to the side of the road, gets out, and checks his tires, which all appear to be fine.

Knowing that he heard and felt something, he continues carefully inspecting his vehicle and that’s when he sees it — a bullet hole in the side of his family’s van, mere inches away from where his children sat in the backseat.

Welcome to America.

Lately, I’ve been suffering from a complete and total inability to think straight.

It’s not that I can’t think at all — I can’t seem to shut my thoughts off — but I’ve not been able to think rationally, with a clear and level head, or with any sort of focus whatsoever.

Maybe you’ve been feeling the same way?

It could have a lot to do with the fact that, unfortunately for many of us, we live in the United States of America, an increasingly oppressive burden which carries with it exceedingly high levels of non-stop, always-on, full-throttle anxiety.

If you’re an American, the one thing you can count on is an endless supply of existential dread, worries to persistently cloud your mind and keep you awake at night, further deteriorating your already worsening physical and mental health. Throw all the time, energy, yoga, meditation, prayer, or pharmaceuticals you want at the smorgasbord of problems facing us, our load isn’t getting any lighter.

The endless stream of bullshit the average American deals with grows deeper by the day.

If the fact that our democratic institutions and democracy itself is crumbling around us wasn’t enough, there’s always the ever-present threat of encroaching fascism, terroristic white nationalism, the erosion of any wall which may have once existed separating church and state, the stripping away of women’s rights, the danger posed to all minority…

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