American sickness

What do American Hustle, American Sniper and American Gangster all have in common? American Sickness. It's in every book, film and news article. It infects every citizen, seeping silently from their pores. A disease they don't know they have. And a stealth killer of us all.

The American Sickness started during colonial times when those "puritans" murdered native Indians with smallpox infected blankets for their land. It's been a relentless massacre ever since.

A nation founded on freedom for all neglected to show anyone the small print; if you can pay for it.

Dollar bills are all printed with the word In God We Trust. As the only higher power Americans believe in is money.

This country gave us irresponsible consumerism. Mass producing trash we don't need, that breaks as soon as we touch it and make us ravenous for it. Filling up landfills, roadsides and oceans; destroying habitats and disregarding human rights by exploiting impoverished children.

It was the Americans who made it acceptable for women to smoke cancer-riddled sticks. It was the Americans who caused the Great Depression to free the banks from government control. It was the Americans who caused the financial crash of 2008 that laid the foundation for the fascists to once against rise up. It was the Americans who went to war with themselves to prevent the abolition of slavery. And it's the Americans who keep selling automatic weapons to mentally unstable people to massacre innocents without consequence.

At every tragedy. During every endless, bloodthirsty war. The self-reflection is nothing but liberal platitudes.

A nation that exclusively drafted black, working-class men to die in an unwinnable war in Vietnam didn't care then about the lives they were taking, just as they don't care now. Because it might have cost lives, but it made money.