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Capitalism Murdered Millions
If capitalism makes everyone better off, why did the US overthrow governments and kill millions of innocent people?
In 2003 I was a 22-year-old with chronic, crippling anxiety, and depression. As I described my symptoms to a doctor in Los Angeles, he pulled out his pad to prescribe six months of Xanax and Paxil. The reasons for the darkness and despair were never assessed, and the mind-numbing drugs only dug a deeper, lonelier, darker hole. The pressure to achieve, perfect, and buy shiny things to flaunt success had already begun to crush me and I couldn’t keep going. Problem solving in American culture is ignore, medicate, and forget because pharmaceuticals fix everything! I had to get out.
The intense drive to escape the US motivated me to leave my apartment by the beach, career, friends, familiarity, boyfriend, and family because traveling as far away as I could seemed to be the only way I could save myself. The invisible layers of American Exceptionalism woven through my skin, thoughts, hair, posture, voice, and ideals shielded the ability to view reality. If the US was “the greatest country in the world”, why was I so miserable? Leaving the country would enable the space I needed to clear my head from the rhetoric, patriotism, and narrative shaping my every decision.
