This one made it into the book. I wrote it in 2006, after years of watching from outside the country while the US ran two wars, gutted its healthcare system, and asked its citizens to blame immigrants for the widening gap between what they’d been promised and what they were living. It aged, unfortunately, like good wine ages — getting more accurate with time.
I was pissed when I wrote this. The essay doesn’t hide that. The United States should have been the greatest country in the world. It had every material advantage. What happened instead was a decades-long process of divestment from the things that make a country great — functional healthcare, accessible education, infrastructure that serves citizens rather than shareholders — while the people doing the divesting successfully redirected public anger downward.
Blame the Mexicans. Blame the welfare recipients. Blame anyone who isn’t a lobbyist or a campaign donor. It worked.
The healthcare argument is the one that ages worst, in the sense of being the most painfully obvious. We don’t have a healthcare system. We have a system that limits what doctors can do, taxes people for being sick, and routes money toward administrative overhead and pharmaceutical profit. The doctors aren’t the problem. The insurance layer is the problem. Most people know this. The policy hasn’t changed because the people profiting from it are very good at funding the people who make the policy.
The essay doesn’t argue for any particular fix. It argues for honesty about what’s broken. The United States is not the beacon of freedom it describes itself as in its own mythology. It is a country in the process of learning what happens when you spend several decades choosing the comfort of the wealthy over the health of the whole. The road to poverty is not dramatic. It’s incremental. It’s the removal of things most people didn’t realize they relied on until they were gone.
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*This piece was expanded and collected in [Not My America: A Stranger in a Strange Land](https://www.amazon.com/Not-My-America-Stranger-Strange-ebook/dp/B0G3C44X7D/) — essays about America observed from the outside, by someone who left and couldn’t quite believe what he found when he looked back. Available in Kindle and paperback.*
**[Get Not My America on Amazon →](https://www.amazon.com/Not-My-America-Stranger-Strange-ebook/dp/B0G3C44X7D/)**
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**You might also like:** [It’s not a New America – It’s the same it always was](https://www.vagobond.com/its-not-a-new-america-its-the-same-it-always-was/), [Secret of ageing no longer a secret](https://www.vagobond.com/secret-of-ageing-no-longer-a-secret/), [The Newest Thing…Craigslist meets Youtube](https://www.vagobond.com/the-newest-thingcraigslist-meets-youtube/)
*Browse the full CD Damitio catalog at [indignified.com/books](https://indignified.com/books)*
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I called most of this chaos years ago. America is still unraveling — and the next chapters are already written.
If you want to understand what’s really coming (and why), read Not My America: A Stranger in a Strange Land. Available on Amazon.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
