As if the title weren’t obvious enough, this post contains harsh language and depressing themes. Be warned.

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It occurs to me that, more and more, Americans (and possibly the world) revel in being complete jerks to other people. Cries of “He speaks his mind.” or “She tells it like it is!” seem to be code for “He/she enjoys belittling people for his/her own amusement.”

Everybody is a jerk once in a while. I’ve been a jerk plenty of times, but it takes a special kind of asshole to be proud of treating people poorly. We’re seeing it all too often today, and it’s getting worse. It’s as if empathy is a quality that’s been bred out of our genetic code. We are allowing public policy be dictated by people who have forgotten their own poor upbringing in a staggering case of ‘I’ve got mine, now screw the rest of you’ mentality. Or worse, people who’ve never known need or want, yet are baffled that others know these things all too well, sit in the halls of power and deny help to those who need it because of some unattainable code they impose on others, but from which they conveniently exempt themselves. Let them eat cake indeed.

The hue and cry against immigration would be hilarious if it weren’t so tragic. To spite our faces, we’ve cut off the only supply of workers willing to work the shittiest, low-paying jobs in America — jobs that most Americans’ wouldn’t even consider — so now there’s no one willing to harvest crops or do other farm work that requires manual labor. There’s going to be a reckoning for our relentless cruelty, and it’s coming right soon in higher food prices and food shortages.

This doesn’t even consider the horror show that’s being specifically inflicted on women of the world. In the US, there’s a movement of man-babies crying about not having any sex, as if they are owed it somehow. Women are systematically being denied the right to choose what to do with their own bodies; how long before they are denied their rights entirely?

How are citizens of the United States not horrified and ashamed that fellow citizens in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands have been without the necessities of life for MONTHS? How can people in Detroit, Michigan — one of the most storied and famous cities in the nation — have to live for YEARS with polluted drinking water that is literally killing them, while their governor gets his water from unpolluted wells outside of the city and thinks nothing of his hypocrisy? How can the police of this nation murder citizens in cold blood and go unpunished? How have we come to this?

Mother Earth needs a good, long rest from us humans. After all the crap we’ve pulled, we don’t deserve to live on a world that is so full of beauty and such an amazing variety of life. It’s not too late to change, to fix things and right wrongs, but I fear we don’t have the guts to make it happen: our own greed is blinding us to the truth of what we do. Seeing the endless cruelty, thoughtless greed, and lack of concern for others so rampant in this country, I can no longer feel proud to be an American. Sadly, the rest of the world seems hell-bent in following suit, even as we plunge into an abyss from which we may not return.