[anamdhek]

I’m a researcher working at a supposedly prestigious university and I can see homeless people with rotting limbs if I step off my campus and don’t look the other way. Some of my colleagues recently were awarded significant private funds to push a compound for a currently incurable dementia to clinical trials. They attended an instructional conference with other awardees and found that several were not there because they are at the NIH and so are under a gag order and travel ban. I am pretty sure Mitch “McConnal,” who spent his career obstructing any progress on the issues I describe below and who paved the way for current events, is actually dying of either a related dementia or the one they are working on, btw. So, what do you recommend Americans do? Never reveal we might have some anger towards being at the whims of people who would rather die themselves than help others? Don’t get me started on the genius who invented the single-person subway or et al.

You are misattributing American madness to the people it is being inflicted on rather than the instigators. We have oil wells behind our homes and schools and the white picket fence chemists I knew and looked up to as a kid are the reason we all have PFAs in our blood. Our president vacillates between saber-rattling at our closest allies, starting a new war in the Middle East, and causing constitutional crises every other day. We don’t have a single-payer healthcare option like every other developed country and our “social safety nets” are so impacted and difficult to get, they might as well not exist for most people. We do, however, have some very, very profitable oligopolies (some which make very tasty fish sandwiches) and higher income inequality than India or Russia.