Oh No! Campaign 2016!

"What I want is power, more power
What I need is an innocent life
Want to do it in the broad daylight
I'm the truck, I'm the suicide

Gotta get into a fight
Can't get out of it
Want to get into a fight
Gonna get away with it
Gotta get into a fight
Watch me, watch me now"

Rolling Stones' song "Fight" written by Jagger, Richards and Ron Woods from the album Dirty Work released in 1985

It's ALL SO UGLY!

In the early Aughts, I knew my marriage was in serious trouble when my ex seemed to live in a parallel universe away from me.  I would come home from work at 6:30, by about 8 or so we would have a huge argument. Now, here is what is strange.  Only 1 set of events happened from 6:30 - 8pm!  If there were cameras, they may show the same exact event from different angles, but we all know that at precisely 6:37:00 pm, there wouldn't be one camera showing me eating spaghetti and another camera showing me smoking a pipe.  That's impossible for me to do both in the exact same second! 

So, it's clear for you all to see that there's only 1 sequence of events!

That's simple.....here's where it gets complicated.  

2 people can have very different points of view about the SAME events that occurred. This is especially true if they are really in disagreement like my ex & I.  If 2 people love each other AND feel they have a GREAT FUTURE together, then those 2 people usually (not always) will have the version of events that are pretty much alike, if not the SAME.  I think we've seen that.  

I remember reading a story. It was about a ho-hum one night stand. It was consensual sex.  The girl's version was amazingly different from the guy!  Now, the girl wasn't wrong and the guy was right.  It was just a matter of different biases, different backgrounds, different points of view, different philosophies about getting together and going to bed. The young man thought that something went wrong.  He was confused.  The woman was happy and thought things were a big improvement over most nights.  

Needless to say that when my wife and I saw things different, when we had our own separate parallel universes we were living in, we fought a lot.  When we fought a lot, night after night, day after day, our marriage eventually died of combat fatigue.  It was made a whole lot worse when she didn't want to accept that she was in some way to blame for the divorce, (just like I was to blame, too!), and there was this awful fictional story of grotesque things I supposedly did which had no truth to them.  Sadder still, was that she convinced herself to believe it.  She could recite the story so well, that it sounded like the truth when it was FICTION!! This is occurring in the United States too.  Some people actually believe that we didn't fight the Civil War over slavery!  That is only one of MANY false narratives going on in our nation.  There's worse ones, and they concern stories of what's happening now!   

Behold what is happening in the United States.  Some call us a superpower (maybe we are, we spend more money than the next several nations with a mighty militaries COMBINED!)

 However, some of us think we're a nation nearly bursting at the seams. Those same people (including ME) feel a certain heartbreak over people saying things about President Obama that seems completely alien to my point of view.  I'm also sad and disgusted about other people, mostly very angry people saying things about Donald Trump and that seems like fiction,too.  

It seems so shocking. 

Many, many Americans are struggling to get by financially.  That is the part we all agree on or about 80-90% of us agree on.   I took a number of economics classes and have a basic understanding of what happened.  This is a simplified version of events. Many people would think that my explanation is true.....here it goes: 

Mike and Mary were husband and wife.  They were married in 1955, then Jim was born in 1961.  When Mike and Mary were raising Jim, their total income was about $25,000 a year.  In those days, that was a pretty good income.   Many families like Mike and Mary had about $15,000 worth of expenses.  There were some more couples that had even less than $15,000 worth of expenses. 
If they made $25,000 and in the same year spent $15,000, we all see that they had $10,000 left over.  That's awesome.  In the 60s, many families had that type of situation.  

During the 70s, there were times when Americans and others around the world suffered from inflation.  The price of things shot up.  That meant that you were going to have a hard time, because if you bought your family $20 worth of groceries in 1971, and then the price of groceries went up to $35 in 1973 and that happened week after week, then that was disturbing.  (That would be $780 you would have to spend more during the year {52 weeks x the $15 increase}).
Fortunately, after 1982, the Americans didn't suffer from inflation.  Inflation is when prices rise dramatically.  However, prices raised some, just not very much.  The percentage of increase was rarely 10% or more.  That's the good news.
The bad news is that starting in 1980 and going up to this year 2016, incomes increased sometimes  but when they did, they increased slowly.  The increases were small.  So, let's go back to Mike, Mary and their son, Jim.   Jim starts working in 1980, he finds a middle class career similar to his father's career.  He gets married to Suzy and they have a child named Ben.
Let's do the math.  Jim and Suzy make about $50,000 a year.  That's twice what Jim's parents made. The problem is that while they make $50,000 a year, their expense are anywhere from $45,000 a year to $55,000 a year.   This type of situation (not exactly the same salary)  happens to millions of Americans.  LOOK AT THE MATH!!
While Mary and Mike saved $10,000 a year, Suzy and Jim are lucky to clear a mere half of that at $5,000 and a lot of years their expenses are exceed their income.  Then, Suzy and Jim use credit cards.   Now, some rich folks say that Suzy and Jim are stupid while their parents were smart.  But, that's Bullshit.  If incomes raise slower and slower, anyone can see that it becomes harder and harder to pay for things!  I don't use a credit card for vacations, because I never went to California or Canada or New York.  I'm happy to say my parents went to many states.  That's great.  They took me to Utah to see my sister one year.  Great trip! But many people in the US don't want to take a vacation if they're in debt by $10,000 or more.
I use a credit card to pay for a car repair.  That's bad too, some will point out, but really now, I need the car to go to work, so SHOOT ME.  Oh, that's right, the economy already did over the years.

So, there's not a big argument that people get fewer and fewer raises.  There's no argument that raises are often smaller and smaller.
People in the United States fight over many, many different reasons of what went wrong between 1970 to 2016.  Some blame it on foreign nations grabbing jobs that were once in the US.  Some blame it on groups of feckless, contemptible groups of people who live in projects and shoot up heroin and join gangs and shoot up people. Some blame the Arabs for making too much money selling us oil, then having people from those nations becoming terrorists. Some people blame ourselves for consuming too much gas in the first place and needing and importing so much oil in the first place.  Some people blame the government even though the federal government has lower tax rates NOW than they did back in 1970.  Others blame illegal immigrants (like Donald Trump).  Some blame the greed of the rich.  Some point out the income disparity between the rich, middle class and poor is as bad as in 1928, the year before the Great Depression.  Just an FYI: the last sentence is pretty much true; it's a fact.  We all agree that things have changed since 1970, but there's just so many people blaming so many other people and things. 

II. 
There's also a different type of problem going on in the United States.
There's a group of  people who are angry that in the 1950s white people had a lot more power than they do now.  Those people like the "good ole' days".  Those people believe that Blacks and Hispanics unjustly benefited from "hand outs" and don't work.  There's some rich folks bitching that half of the people are on Welfare.  Those same people don't know shit because the unemployment rate is 5.5% and when things were really bad in 2009, when there was a horrible recession, when Obama first became president, we were just over 10% unemployment. There's NEVER, EVER was a time where 1/2 the people were on welfare.  That's like the bullshit parallel universe that I complained about at the beginning of this story!! People just see things around them or look at a paper occasionally and think that's the way  things are all over.  They get about 1/11th of the real story.  They construct a group of people who are to blame while I believe another group is to blame.
There's White people who are terrified that in 2050, white people will be outnumbered by the minority population of Blacks and Hispanics combined.  That doesn't bother me one damn bit.  That's not horrible, that's just demographics!  You have these racists who scream about the "dying white race".
 It's awful.  I see Whites complain of Blacks and Blacks complain of Whites.  I've seen Blacks complain of Hispanics and Hispanics complain of Blacks.  I've seen Mexicans complain of Puerto Ricans and Puerto Ricans complain of Mexicans.  I had a close friend about 10 years ago.  Her parents were from Puerto Rico.  She was a good person, hard worker and ethical woman and probably still is.  The only time she yelled at me was the time I accidentally called her "Mexican".  Yeah, she screamed at me. I guess I made a mistake.

The United States is really not United that much.  I don't know if we'll ever be United.
  If we don't agree on the facts, how can we agree on the solutions?