I just saw a headline today checking the news, "111 hour work week to pay rent in NYC" or something like that.
And all I could think was, wow, what the actual ****.
Does anyone who runs things actually know that's how it is?
And if so, how does any one among them seriously look at that and think, "yep, nothing wrong here, everything's working just fine"?!?!
Granted, it's NYC, which has been notorious for expensive rent since the beginning of time.
And I didn't actually read the article for context.
But still. It doesn't take a genius to realize that that is not functional, sustainable, viable. That isn't living.
I guess they could move out of NYC. They probably should. If it's so expensive to live someplace that you can't live there working normal hours, then you can't live there, it's not going to work. You won't get to enjoy any of the benefits of living there. You're going to struggle, you only for your life to not function anyway. And it's not worth it to live somewhere that you have to work so much that you can't have an actual life. You're just going to burn out. But it's not simple to just up and move, financially, logistically, or in other ways, especially multiple times. And people should have some kind of stability in their lives.
And anyone being like, "blah blah entitled" - **** you.
People like you make this country worse, and enable the *******s to lower our standard of living.
No one should be living like that, especially in a place that has the nerve to call itself "a free country", or "the greatest country on Earth".
America used to be better than this, people fought to make it better exactly because it was so miserable and dysfunctional before, during the first Gilded Age, and then the Depression. It used to be better than this, within my own lifetime - I distinctly remember it being better. There wasn't a worsening cost of living crisis every year, there was relative stability. Now, we're devolving into a third-world country. And they have people so brainwashed, that anyone suggesting any improvement at all on "the way it is" - even to go back to how things were in the postwar era - is instantly written off as a communist, Antifa, or some other Boogeyman of the Month.
People like that make me understand how anger over politics and ideology spills over into the real world, because sometimes I think I would fight these ******** in the street. I don't care that they are brainwashed and are also mostly victims of a con. But at the same time, it's not worth jail or a record, and it won't change anything anyway.
For real though, if we're going to say that that's OK, then we need to drop all this ******** about being a civilization, and ESPECIALLY drop this pretense that we're a "Christian nation". There's nothing Christian about that. I'm very skeptical about religion, but one thing I will say to its credit is that it gave people the idea that there was something higher than base instinct, survival of the fittest, might makes right, and cold, brutal Darwinian competition - that sentient beings like us could and should do better because it was the right thing to do. We seem to have forgotten that. And you know what they say about those who forget their history - they're doomed to repeat it.
And it gets me so mad because it doesn't have to be this way anymore. We got out of this once, because enough people realized that "hey, this sucks, this is ********!". For the love of whatever you hold dear, why did we allow ourselves to regress back to this????
**** this New Gilded Age. **** this ******** Future.
/end rant