There is a profound irony to the persistence and acceptance of the notion that the United States is somehow a "free" country whose citizens and residents do not have to worry about state terror or to "live in fear".
When on September 12 "An unidentified gunman shot and killed five people in a series of shootings on Wednesday in Southern California before taking his own life" the county sheriff said “This is the new normal, if you look across the country”.
No question. Though not really all that new.
Perpetual violence has long been a norm, especially when directed at people from racialized or marginalized communities.
Many of the victims have been killed by the armed wing of the state, the police.
Between January 1, 2017 and June 20, 2018, American cops killed 1,506 people. Despite representing only 13.4% of the population African Americans were at least 21.58% of those killed.
These numbers are far in excess of police killings - actual or proportional - in any other "developed democracies". As just one example Germany, with a population of 82 million, had just 14 killings by police in all of 2017 versus 987 in the land of the free.
If you are not getting killed by the cops, your fellow Americans will oblige. In just one 48 hour period this past week the headlines read "Gunman wounds 4 in Pennsylvania court building lobby, is killed by police" and "Woman kills 3 before fatally shooting herself at Rite Aid distribution center in Maryland, officials say". The only remarkable aspect to this commonplace American news was that one of these mass shootings involved a woman shooter, an occurrence that is extremely rare.
Approximately 17,250 Americans will be murdered in 2018, and over 12,000 of the murders will be committed by a gun. "The U.S. gun homicide rate is 25 times that of other high-income countries." In excess of 21,000 Americans will commit suicide using a gun while the "U.S. gun suicide rate is eight times that of other high-income countries".
The American terror state has more than one way to ruin your life or kill you though. Thanks to a political class beholden to business interests and grotesque libertarian narratives, Americans remain the only people in a developed nation without some type of system of universal health care.
This leads to such awful spectacles as that of a "6-year-old selling lemonade to help with mom's chemotherapy" in Texas. As of May, 2018, the "number of uninsured adults between the ages of 19 and 64 rose to 15.5 percent in March 2018, up from 12.7 percent in 2016. An estimated 4 million people lost individual coverage during that period"
Of course, many millions of Americans are a pay check or two away from destitution or no medical insurance, living in a state of perpetual financial anxiety. In 2017 a survey by the US Federal Reserve found that "Some 44% of people said they could not cover an unexpected $400 emergency expense or would rely on borrowing or selling something to do so".
Further, some "50.8 million households or 43 percent of households can’t afford a basic monthly budget for housing, food, transportation, child care, health care and a monthly smartphone bill".
This is nearly HALF of all American households.
40.6 million people in the United States live in poverty.
"According to the World Bank, 769 million people lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2013; they are the world’s very poorest. Of these, 3.2 million live in the United States." In what is seen as the wealthiest nation in the world.
This has countless ripple effects. "Infant mortality rates in the US exceed those in all other developed countries and in many less developed countries, suggesting political factors may contribute". It also means that "Americans lead shorter and less healthy lives than people in other high-income countries" and "the largest share of the American health disadvantage is likely to be borne by the poor and least educated, who have much higher rates of disease and death than their counterparts in Europe".
Meanwhile American business interests have been so successful in destroying the rights of workers and in creating neo-feudal "right to work" and " at-will employment" anti-union states that you can have a situation where "Employers can fire employees who evacuated for hurricane in North Carolina". And some employers did.
In these states "private-sector employees can be fired for any reason – or no reason at all", leaving workers in a place where the guillotine is always over their heads.
Unsurprisingly, given this, "Americans are piling on debt way faster than the economy is growing"
Remember none of these things are "tragedies" or somehow random events. They are directly the result of choices made by the American state and its officials and representatives right or "left". The consequence of the destruction of the very temporary post-war "social compromise". The creation of a political, intellectual and business class that wanted to ensure the permanent disenfranchisement, debasement and disempowerment of working people, the marginalized, the racialized and people living in poverty.
Daily violence, death and suffering rising out of the ashes of a class war that the corporations and wealthy have, for now, unequivocally won.
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