The Land of Missed Opportunities: On Capitalism, Healthcare, and Beating the War Drum

by Cynthia Tarana

If you can count on anything in aMERICA, it’s that we will buy the lie, or at the very least, “purchase a smidge of truth.”

This isn’t new. It goes back to the colonizers and their treatment of the Indigenous people who had lived here long before we “discovered” shit, and of course it runs through our “original sin” of slavery. The foundation of aMERICA was always built on someone else’s suffering, dressed up in the language of freedom and opportunity.

The Revolutionary Grandfather of Punk Rock, Hilly Kristal, understood this better than most. “Capitalism destroys culture,” he said, “and it will ultimately cost us our soul.” He also said aMERICA had outpriced the ability to become an artist, and he called for socialism without apology. Capitalism is the antithesis to creativity, and economic culture is no culture at all. We’ve even reached the point where corporations need “Influencers” now—mass-produced marketing tools looking for new suckers—to sell you shit you probably didn’t even want, let alone need.

Hilly understood the importance of creating a space. He was a pioneer who bestowed on us something so monumental it shifted the whole fucking culture. I was born in ’72, a year before CBGB opened its doors, and I never did make it there before he lost his battle with NYC. But I’ve been obsessed with that era since my early teens, when I first discovered the Ramones.

Generations of outcasts like myself reap the rewards of Hilly’s vision every day, but by aMERICA’s standards Hilly would be considered a failure. He operated on thin-to-nothing margins and couldn’t even afford to purchase the building when he had the opportunity. CBGB, which should have been given Historical Status, is now a John Varvatos that sells t-shirts 99% of New Yorkers can’t afford. Oh, the irony.

Most aMERICANS have gone so all-in on “Economic Culture” that anything else looks crazy to them. Why wouldn’t you want to follow the blueprint? Go to college—if you are one of the lucky ones who can afford it. Spit out the 2.5 kids, even if you don’t really want them, then force-feed and repeat the whole damn lie to another generation. They are so embedded in the matrix they can’t even see how bland and unoriginal they’ve become. Our “culture” now seems to be mindless, vapid, mass-produced drivel, and it was by design. Keep those hamster wheels spinning.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what sparked the most recent “tip” in our collective consciousness. It almost always takes something really loud to break through the noise.

No matter your thoughts on Luigi Mangione, you cannot deny that his actions spurred a conversation most Americans were quite eager to have. My husband and I don’t see it the same way and I’ll leave it at that. What I will say is this: I wish we lived in a world where none of it was necessary, where Luigi and the rest of us didn’t have to rely on the goodwill of healthcare CEOs who make their bonuses denying claims and deciding who lives and who dies. I’m sure at some point a switch of justification flipped in that CEO’s head, that he was “taking care of his family.” But at the expense of how many other families?

In August, my body started its revolt, attacking my eyes first and then moving on to my kidneys. I’m one of the fortunate ones with insurance, and as of last Saturday the bills started rolling in. Thousands of dollars out of pocket so far and I’m sure more on the way. There are multiple studies, Harvard included, on the moral dilemma of whether it’s acceptable to sacrifice one to save the many. It’s a debate that’s been going on for decades, but it really boils down to whether you or someone you love has been fucked, or worse, by an insurance company.

But this is aMERICA, the land of missed opportunities to have conversations that could actually improve our lives, and yet again we have chosen to beat the war drum for Empire.

Let’s not delude ourselves into thinking Trump is the first to do this, as the Neo-Libs would have you believe. He is a continuation, a manifestation of decades of ignorance and apathy at the world’s expense. The same bad foreign policy thinking that brought us 9/11 is still running, just pointed at new targets. We again have leadership, and I use that term as loosely as possible, willing to sacrifice the lives of many for the few. We are once again at war, and it will not make us safer. It never does.

It’s reminded me of another one of those original truth-tellers who has been whitewashed and watered down for public consumption: Muhammad Ali, who said “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong,” and became a Conscientious Objector, perhaps the most “reviled” thing you can be by aMERICAN standards. Ali begged the question: “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?” And then he was stripped of his heavyweight title, convicted of draft evasion, and banned from boxing for over three years during his prime. Then once he was safely dead and mythologized, they put him on a stamp.

That’s what we do with our truth-tellers. Punish them first, sell them back to you later.

I’m proud to say that, as an Associate Member of Veterans For Peace, I’ve had the honor of knowing one or two Conscientious Objectors myself—people who looked at the machine and refused to feed it, at real personal cost. That refusal still feels like the most radical act available to us.

A little over a year ago I closed an essay with Joe Strummer’s words: “the future is unwritten,” and suggested we write it well. I’ve been watching what we’ve written since then. It’s not exactly aMERICA’s best work. But that future is the past now, and there’s a new one in front of us, still unwritten. I don’t know about you, but I came armed with a pen.

Cynthia Tarana is a heavily tattooed Ex-Con with no college education and very bad punctuation. She currently lives on Long Island, NY where she pays extremely high taxes, likes to drink, rage against the machine and shop at the GAP.