Raised in Captivity: Living the American Nightmare
Living in the United States is a daily dose of trauma. Our nation is philosophically and pragmatically built on injustice, oppression, exploitation, violence, dehumanization, and planetary destruction. We hide behind the lie of “American Exceptionalism,” but a closer look reveals an anxiety-ridden nation where citizens scurry about like rats competing with one another for the scraps that fall from corporate tables.
Think about it, in no other developed country can you go bankrupt for getting sick. No other nation saddles it’s youth with crushing student debt. Thanks to our Puritanical roots, there isn’t a healthy work-life balance; hustle culture is celebrated while sabbath rest is an abnormality. Then there’s the incessant fear of violence and the crumbling of our democratic structures. We are the only nation who refuses to end daily gun massacres. Americans can be counted on to burn books and build more bombs. Thirty percent of the American population is actively working with an authoritarian politician to destroy democracy. We are a country that complains about not having enough resources for schools and teachers while at the same time spending billions of dollars on the industrial military complex. We exist in a cage of political, religious, and familial polarization. To be anything but a white male means you are guaranteed to be treated unjustly in court, in school, in the doctor’s office, the grocery store, and in church. The average double-income family can’t afford to buy a home, while many of us are side-hustling just to survive. Unfortunately, most of us will never look up long enough from our screens to give a damn. It’s why the entertainment industry is so important to the powers that be. If they can keep you satiated, you’ll never wake up or ask questions.
We are living in what theologian John Dominic Crossan called a domination system—shorthand for a way of organizing society in a hierarchical, patriarchal, power-driven arrangement where the masses are politically oppressed, economically exploited, and socially marginalized. This same system has an almost demonic disregard for the environment. Worse yet, the largest Christian movement in the United States can be counted on to support it all. It’s madness writ large in drag as the “American Dream.”
I want out, and I am not alone. Kirstin Powers, Holy Heretics podcast guest and former political correspondent to CNN writes:
“Something is deeply wrong with the United States, and I don’t want to live here anymore…I began to notice a learned helplessness in the United States, where people don’t revolt at the notion of a college-education costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. I wondered why so many people treat it as completely normal that we have GoFundMe campaigns to help people pay for life-saving medical care that their insurance won’t cover. I realized there are other places in the world where life isn’t about conspicuous consumption and crushing and killing your life goals, where people aren’t drowning in debt just to pay for basic life necessities. There are places where people have free time to do things they love—not start a side hustle. I started to have a dawning awareness that we don’t have to live this way.”
We don’t seem to realize it, but most of us are suffering from Complex PTSD simply for existing in this dirty, rotten system. A system, by the way, that we benefit from and participate in. It’s easy to think of trauma as a single event—an assault, a car wreck, or earthquake. Complex trauma is being exposed repeatedly to events and an environment that threatens, harms, dehumanizes, or destroys the human person. “Trauma erodes the integrity and structure and function of a healthy mind. When people are traumatized, they are afterwards ever more easily triggered…In other words, their automatic survival patterns kick in — they begin fighting desperately for life itself, even in moments where, perhaps, they don’t need to,” writes Umair Haque.
In the words of today’s podcast guest Derrick Jensen, “In order for us to maintain this way of life, we must tell lies to each other, and to tell lies to ourselves. Truth must be avoided at all costs.” The truth about our economy, about our dying planet, about violence and domination at the family and cultural level; truth about the daily injustices that rule our lives in this decaying empire.
Life doesn’t have to be this way. We can work together to create a more just and equitable world. We can carve out subversive spaces even if we will never be able to leave these shores for a different home. We can work for the world Mary envisioned when she prayed for God to scatter the proud, bring down the powerful from their thrones, lift up the lowly, and fill the hungry with good things. We can work to turn the world upside down, or right-side up by rejecting imperial ideology and embracing the Kingdom of God, or what Dr. Martin Luther King called “the beloved community.” As Brian Recker recently posted on Instagram, “The way of the world leaves people out, but in the beloved community marginal people are brought to the center.” In almost every way, the United States stands in opposition to the Politics of Jesus. His revolutionary platform demanded enemy love (which means you don’t kill them), solidarity with the poor, the distribution of wealth, welcoming the stranger, radical feminism, and racial equality.
Today’s conversation on Holy Heretics with eco-philosopher and environmentalist Derrick Jensen invites us to envision this way of life. A way that will take great courage, but is necessary for the life of every sentient being on this planet.
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This might be the most important conversation we’ve had to date, I hope you will give it a listen.
Gary Alan Taylor
