It's an interesting feeling to realize you've been propagandized to for your entire life. I'm simultaneously angry at those who've lied to me, although they're often victims of the same propaganda. I also feel free, and able to reanalyze all these things I thought I knew with an entirely new context for understanding the world.
I stumbled across an article from the Global Times titled “Phrase ‘US kill line’ sparks debate on American ordinary people’s economic fragility and social safety nets on Chinese social media." The Global Times is explicitly Chinese state media, so take it for what it is, and be aware of it's bias.
The article explains that "kill line" is zoomer slang referring to when you're playing a game, and your health is low enough that you can be killed with one shot (apparently, idk, I've never heard it, but I'm not a gamer). The gist of the article is that Chinese kids are starting to learn about American poverty, and about how close so many Americans are to being homeless, and they don't have a way to relate to it. In 1979, the Chinese government made a goal of creating a "moderately prosperous society." That is, a society made up almost entirely of the middle class, with no extremes at either end. It was an ambitious goal, as the World Bank estimated that 88% of the population of China lived in extreme poverty. Over the last forty years, they've managed to bring 850,000,000 people out of poverty by devoting their economy to centrally planned jobs programs similar to The New Deal in the United States. It's an absolutely staggering accomplishment, and they're not done yet, but the progress they've made is nothing short of miraculous. It's remarkable what can happen when government focuses it's spending internally, on it's own citizens.
The idea that all Americans know that we're just a few bad dice rolls away from complete financial ruin, and that we all more-or-less accept it, is absolutely wild. It struck me recently that last year was without a doubt the most devastating year of my life, and if I didn't have family that could support me financially, and didn't get extremely lucky at work, there's a good chance I'd have lost everything as a result.
To set the stage, I was unemployed for about 10 months in 2024. I lost my job in March, and didn't start a new one until December. So I came into the year with considerable debt just from trying to make it through 2024. Then, of course, my wife died in early February. It was impossible to give a shit about literally anything else for months (which I still struggle with now, 15 months out). I'm extraordinarily lucky that my brand new job gave me basically as much time as I needed. I had only been there for two months, after all, they didn't owe me anything. Even so, I don't like that people need to get lucky to make it through situations like that, as opposed to having a publicly funded safety net that we could count on.
Then, in May my gall bladder decided to get infected, and once again, had I not gotten lucky with how supportive my work was and if I didn't have health insurance at the time, it could've single handedly put me underwater. The hospital bill was something like $60,000 without insurance. If all that hadn't managed to wipe me out, a microburst of wind in my back yard sending an entire whole-ass tree falling on top of my house might've. There's a possible world in which I'm homeless right now.
I've realized that people don't hate homeless people for any particular reason (and no doubt about it, housed people do hate the homeless, although they rarely come out and say it). People hate homeless people because they're a reminder of exactly how close 95% of Americans are to the same fate. Instead of blaming the systems that allow homelessness to happen in the first place, we've been propagandized into blaming the homeless people themselves.
But it doesn't have to be this way. There are better ways to organize a country and economy, we know that for an absolute fact. China's done it. Do you know how much it would cost to permanently house all of the homeless people in the entire country? Roughly $9.6 billion. Put another way, it would cost about five days of this war we started in Iran for no particular reason. That's just the military spend. The devastation that this war will continue to wreck on the economy makes the two costs almost non-comparable.
Is China a utopia where everyone has everything they need? Of course not. Do they have their issues with human rights and censorship? Of course. And naturally, that's all the New York Times boiled down the whole "American Kill Line" concept to - Chinese propaganda, nothing more. But it seems obvious to me that they're doing something right.
Today, Meta and Nike announced new rounds of layoffs, and Microsoft announced they'd be offering early retirement to people (and presumably laying people off if the offers aren't taken). Amazon laid off 30,000 people already this year (but don't worry, the CEO got a 30% raise and stock is up 14.67% since the start of the year). Block and Salesforce have also announced massive layoffs, and have explicitly blamed it on AI reducing their need for human employees. And of course, because of last year's Big Beautiful Bill, all of these tech industry workers being laid off won't be able to get on Medicaid, and because of the war and tarriffs, inflation is skyrocketing and everything is more expensive.
Our economy is broken. We need to try something new, and we need to try it soon, because the amount of people suffering has been rising drastically over the past 10 years, and it's going to continue to rise as wealth inequality reaches new extremes.
We have a rare chance these midterm elections to elect representatives who are about as far left as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar. People absolutely hate Trump and the Republican run congress. Yet somehow, people hate the Democrats almost as much! It's remarkable. But it leaves the door open for Democratic challengers from the left who want to implement real, drastic change. In Denver, Melat Kiros is launching a strong primary campaign against Diana Degette, our 14-term congresswoman. In Michigan, Dr. Abdul Sayed is running a strong primary for the Democratic nomination for the Senate. There are examples of this all over the country, of socialists and leftists running for office. I don't know about you, but I've seen enough of where imperialist neoliberal policies get us, and I'm ready to try something new.