When your day is long
And the night
The night is yours alone
When you’re sure you’ve had enough
Of this life
Well hang on
Don’t let yourself go
‘Cause everybody cries
And everybody hurts sometimes
These are the words of the immutably empathetic Michael Stipe. The song Everybody Hurts was written as a plea to teenagers to stop committing suicide during a media imposed hysteria on the topic, still, it was most certainly effective and saved the lives of millions of teens who just needed a little life coaching in A minor.
Unfortunately the song is so bad that many more people actually committed suicide because of it. Yet, Stipe had good intentions, as he recently told me while dressed in Shiite Muslim ceremonial regalia and laying in a mud puddle. I didn’t ask.
Everything sucks right now unless you’re a multi-millionaire. That phrase has never not been true in America. It should replace In God We Trust on the currency and somehow be worked into the national anthem, thoroughly conflicting our heroic athletes who care about injustice so much that they kneel for ninety seconds a week.
The stimulus money went mostly to multi-national corporations, while most Americans received a check for twelve hundred dollars. The two trillion dollar package would have evened out to about ten thousand dollars per eligible person, were it distributed evenly.
This is unjust. If you are surprised that this happened then you’re probably the type of person who thanks Wells Fargo for their commitment to supporting the troops.
The president of the country threatened military against the citizens of the country over twitter (the platform of ineffectual bitches the world over), stating “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
The president didn’t invent this phrase, it’s a quote from an avowedly racist Miami police chief from the 1960’s.
Granted, the president has no grasp of history nor is he even literate, so it stands probable this dog whistle was written by Stephen Miller – one of the president’s closest aides, and a white supremacist.
Later, the president utilized federal forces to shoot tear gas at peaceful protesters near the White House so that he could pose for a photo where he held the Bible as though it were a ribbon he won for growing the biggest cabbage.
The reason people were out protesting is that the police in Minneapolis murdered a black guy. Police murder black guys at a sickeningly disproportionate rate in this country, a fact more troubling than the already troubling fact that they are armed to the teeth and instructed to loot citizens in the form of economic thuggery on a minute-to-minute and day-by-day basis.
Amidst the protests, the president called for governors of every state of the union to “dominate the streets”, as most major cities imposed curfews.
It was ironic that, during a time in which people were protesting the abuse of authority at the hands of police, a restriction on basic movement would be imposed, giving the police free reign to arrest anyone who was now committing a crime simply by being outside.
They were now free to cruise around in their military grade vehicles, effectively dominating the streets. Nobody on the right, and few of the status quo left noticed the irony from their couches.
Amidst a slough of police brutality in response to the protests regarding police brutality, some cops in Buffalo assaulted a seventy five year old man named Martin Gugino, shoving him to the ground and sending him to the hospital.
The president responded by libeling Gugino rather than condemning the police, tweeting out an easily debunked conspiracy theory and thereby accomplishing his goals of condoning force against peaceful protesters and spreading disinformation and propaganda in one svelte swoop:
“Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?”
This entire cacophony of trash came amidst the peak of a global pandemic, which led to an unprecedented “lockdown” in cities across the country and the world, which required people to stay at home in one form or another and for businesses to be closed, which led to an economic meltdown.
Before George Floyd was murdered, the people who like the racist president were becoming understandably frustrated at the lockdown and being unable to leave their homes. They were skeptical of the scientific reasoning behind the restrictions, so they gathered en mass to protest.
After George Floyd was murdered, the people who like the racist president became angry that people would gather en masse out of protest, and largely supported the racist president’s promise to “dominate the streets.”
These people are generally hostile toward science, yet condoning of clampdowns on civil liberties, just so long as they don’t agree with the message.
They are ignorant racists. Indeed, there is no other way to put it. But, it still sucks for them right now, because they aren’t multi-millionaires. Poor whites have been used as pawns since well before the Civil War. Unfortunately, they remain unable to grasp these nuances.
So, everybody hurts. Black people are hurting. They’re tired of police brutality and a nationwide police occupation which seeks to target their neighborhoods and disproportionately send people to jail for often trivial infractions.
Seeing someone who could easily be themselves of a loved one murdered on video understandably induces feelings of anger, rage, and sadness.
People on the left are hurting because of the generality of injustice; police brutality combined with a president who is anti civil rights and aggressively invoking martial law.
People on the right are hurting because they are poor, and conflicted about the role the government should play in dictating their lives. Latinos had plenty to be pissed about before any of this started. Working people are hurting. Small business owners are hurting. Renters are hurting. Landlords are hurting.
Everyone who isn’t a multi-millionaire is hurting.
The allure of America is that everyone purportedly has the chance to make something of themselves, to build themselves up independently. It doesn’t matter if you’re Donald Trump – who inherited four hundred million inflation adjusted dollars from his slumlord father which he turned into debt – or, say, Skip Bayless.
This isn’t quite a fallacy, but it overlooks a crucial point: Not everyone can make it. Picture a jar of jelly beans. There are 621 billionaires in the United States. They have eaten ninety percent of the jelly beans.
How does one become a billionaire? Just how is it possible to amass that much wealth? About half of the 621 inherited a billion dollars or more, so that explains that – they did nothing. Of the rest, they likely possess elite intelligence in regards to business and are exceptionally hard working.
The average American worker makes $31,000 a year. Jeff Bezos is worth 153 billion dollars. He’s fifty six years old, so assuming he started working at age eighteen that’s four billion dollars a year. There is no doubt that Jeff Bezos is more intelligent and driven than your average worker. But is he 153,000 times smarter and/or hard working than them?
That’s impossible. Even Superman isn’t even 153,000 times stronger than Dwayne Johnson, and Dwayne Johnson is very strong.
This isn’t to say that one cannot live a fruitful life without being a multi-millionaire, but they’re going to be struggling at some point. In the system we’ve set up, for everyone who makes it to billionaire status, there are going to be thousands of people living paycheck to paycheck. There just aren’t enough jelly beans to go around.
A lot of people have very specific gripes. They’re all important, and none of it matters.
As long as people are living paycheck to paycheck, especially when constantly exposed to those who personally benefit from their puny paychecks, people are going to be angry, and people are going to be hurting.
Everybody hurts, unless you’re a multi-millionaire. Black Lives Matter. The changes that need to be made are right in front of us. With proper foresight, not everybody will hurt.