How I Make Sense of the American Way of Life

When looking through the units we’ve been through since the beginning of the year, I’ve come to realize that Americans would be at a complete lost if it weren’t for our retarded government system. The constitution basically controls our lives. Capitalism controls our lives by infiltrating our working minds. Birth is changed greatly and made to look like a disease. Health care is very unjust and many Americans do not have it because they can’t afford it. Our economy is made to look like everyone is equal and how hard you work defines how successful you are. Food is just a fucked up mess that the majority of Americans are completely oblivious to. Energy is the basis of life, but people do not know that the way we get it has a massive affect on the environment. Americans will not resist authority, it’s almost as if we were brainwashed to believe that the United States of America is the best place the live because of its so-called “prosperous” economy.

The constitution, Americans refuse to disobey this sacred piece of paper containing racist, sexist, and unfair rules that are suppose to control our wholes lives. The constitution was created by evil, lying white supremacists who used euphemisms throughout the constitution. The constitution was written so it could control the government that controlled the Americans. There are rules in it that shape our lives. The constitution was set up to keep things from being equal. All the powers are definitively separated. Power was separated to prevent a possible tyranny and to keep the powers to the rich people. When power is not granted to the citizens of America, we citizens become scared. We are scared because we cannot fight back with small numbers but there are not enough people to fight the government system. The constitution is a solid base that will not be broken because the people with power do not care for the little pests that lack in power.

Capitalism is the way the government handles sales in the United States. It is suppose to be an economic system in which goods and services are produced, consumed and distributed through the mechanism of free markets based deeply on the right to private property and the profit motive. What a lie. I agree with my history teacher, Andy’s, definition of capitalism. He stated that “Capitalism is an economic system in which the overflowing majority toil for the profit of the tiny minority. “We work, they profit.” What Andy is saying here is that the working class makes up the majority of America and they all work for the minority of rich business owners who don’t do any work but gain profit on the labor of the majority. These business owners start out with wealth and create capital. When capital is created, labor is needed to make the profit. When the profit is made, the business owners collect it and hands out small portions of it to their workers and keep the majority of it to themselves. Which they then use to create more capital and the cycle starts again because the business owners had already started out with wealth in their pockets.

Capitalism has alienated our lives from ourselves. Labor has been commodified and alienated. The working class and below have no wealth, therefore they don’t own any commodities. The only thing they know how to sell is their own labor. They have learned to commodify their own bodies in order to make a living while the rich white folk sit back and relax as hundreds of Americans are making money for them.

Once again Americans will not resist the authority of their employers so they can maybe have better benefits. Americans will do anything to make money; they will not risk losing their jobs because they want to stand up for themselves one day. Capitalists will continue to expropriate the workers who work hard to support their families. In the end, the American way of life is not family based, it is entirely work based.

Birth is seen with similarity to a science experiment. Doctors like to explore the inner depths of a woman’s body so they can know what is the best possible way for women to give birth. In reality, the best way for a woman to give birth is by listening to her own body. She does not need the drugs involved in giving birth according to doctoral commands. This is another incident where Americans will always listen to authority. If the doctor said the woman had to get a c- section even if she didn’t want one to start with, she is walking out of that hospital after an expensive 2 days stay with stitches across her belly. In times of crisis, human beings tend to do what the alpha power chooses, obediently.

People both long for and fear chaos. But when doctors take control, they begin to take too much control to try and relieve stress but the pressure from the doctor will on put more stress on the mom and baby. Borders cross and good becomes evil.

As seen in the biased movie “Business of Being Born” midwives are the better and more conventional way to go for births. Even though the movie was really biased in showing only the pros of midwifery and the cons of hospital births, I agree that midwives are the better way to go. It is a way for Americans to fight back authority. When midwives are chosen, women are not giving doctors the satisfaction of controlling another birth. Women are not allowing doctors to have their way in order to make the most amount of money for themselves. Medical decisions are made by monetary and legal decisions rather than what is best for the mother.

There is also the question of money when it comes to birth. When women are pregnant, they are at a higher risk for diabetes, high blood pressure, or possibly death and others. Insurance companies do not want to pay for you. Insurance companies want you to pay them. So they will raise your rate if they catch wind of a possible ailment that you may have. When the rate is raised, Americans need to work harder to pay for their life insurance.

When an American receives a paycheck, the whole paycheck is never taken home. The government taxes it and takes some out for this so called social security savings that they’ll never see.

When Danish kids visited us from Denmark, they taught us about their government and health system and vice versa. We learned that it was actually hard to be poor in Denmark. Everything there is a given. Free health care, free college, and free hospital visits. Though their highest tax bracket may have been 63% it doesn’t mean that 63% of their paychecks when to taxes. 63% is just the nominal tax, in actuality, the people there are paying the same taxes as we are but in addition they are getting stuff for free while we have to pay for it all.

Taxes in the United States may all seem equal. But $5000 worth of taxes could be easily paid by a rich person whereas $5000 would take a large toll on a lower social class. When it comes to health insurance, it looks like rich people are going to survive longer than the lower social classes. Our government is not egalitarian.

In the movie SiCKO, Michael Moore showed us how hard it is for lower class individuals to receive health care. This was also a biased movie that I sided with. Moore did not show any pros to the American health care system. Instead he showed us that being a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay is better than being a U.S. citizen. He did not show us the torture that the prisoners go through and how some health cares are indeed affordable in America. Moore described to us that in order to people to get the medications they need, they get married to Canadians or follow Moore onto a ship to Guantanamo.

Michael Moore showed us ways to go against authority and fight for our right to stay healthy without having to relinquish our paychecks to multiple taxes and health agencies. The question of the matter is, will Americans follow his advice? Will we go against authority? The answer is no. We become lost and scared without the government riding on our asses telling us what is the right thing to do and how we should do it.

Food is one of the main aspects of life. We will die without food. We, Americans, all consume food on a daily basis multiple times a day but we never knew where our food really came from until now. Food starts out innocent, becomes dirty and disgusting and then we eat it all when it’s cooked and tasty. Food is derived from the natural resources of the land. We steal the nutrients of the land to provide ourselves with large amount of food to support a large population because agriculture was introduced.

The introduction to agriculture was all the start of our slow demise. We have become lazy slums who are entirely reliant on machinery to provide us with our living needs. We are letting machinery take over the cultural aspects of the American Way of Life. We have let our lives get controlled by various different authorities because we are too lazy to haul our asses around to do our own work and to stand up for ourselves. No, we just let the government handle things and we just sit back and do our own thing. Be it working or just taking leisure time, we are not controlling our lives. The government has corrupted us with the idea that they are letting us take control of our lives by taking control of the major aspects of life so we don’t have to worry about them. As a result they go behind our backs and perform inhuman acts to animal so we apathetic Americans can enjoy our meat. We enjoy the meat so much that humans cannot handle the amounts of meat produced so animals are put through cycles of a factory in order for there to be enough to go around.

Agriculture has made America explode with people and technology. With new technology brings more food which brings more people who then bring more technology. This is a continual cycle that will soon break because we will soon run out of natural resources.

Our natural resources are not being preserved so they can have time to grow again. We are using so much of it so fast that there can only be so much in the world. The nutrients are being sucked out of the earth so fast that there isn’t enough time for the earth to reproduce it. Accordingly, Americans will pour steroids and excess nutrients in order to liven the soil to which our produce will grow.

Nutrients will always be back, trees can grow back over time if given it but what about our oil and fossil fuel? Oil and fossil fuel is the basis of our lives. If they run out what will we do? Sure there will be the sun but the sun will soon become to hot because of the holes in the ozone layer caused by the pollution from the oils and gases we used. We can go to the authorities and they will tell us to just relax, everything will be taken care of and we will do exactly that because Americans are blind mice letting his cheese get stolen by his neighbors. We will turn or backs to the problem because we do not feel that we have the authoritative power to do something. Because we will be scared and helpless but all we’ll say is “the government will take care of it”.