Some Numbers:

There are about 130 million full time jobs in the US

Half of US jobs (65 million) are under $15 an hour.

7 million full time jobs are open.

44 million people live in poverty

Telling the poor to just "Get a job" is not only cruel, but mathematically absurd.

The American Dream is a fiction.

It's a dangerous lie that we build our society atop.

It's a mathematical fallacy. The numbers just aren't there.

And if anyone thought about it for half a second that would be apparent.

But we insist on refusing.

If you just ask yourself "Are there more high-paying jobs or low-paying jobs?" then you realize pretty quickly that even if EVERY SINGLE PERSON was diligent and educated and qualified and made all the right decisions, most people would STILL not be able to get livable salaries.

We unthinkingly tell people that if they just work harder, if they just study harder, if they just try harder, that everyone has the opportunity to move up the ladder.

We tell them this knowing full well that there's not enough space for everyone to climb.

It's an awful joke to play on people.

To strap their identity and self-worth on their capacity to achieve the mathematically impossible.

Worse, knowing that it's a lie, we also gauge OUR respect for them on that same capacity.

It's just... wrong.

But we do it anyway.

Teaching our kids the American Dream is no different than telling them that if they don't reach 7 feet tall it's a personal failing.

It's not in their control and pretending it is merely sets people up for a life of unnecessary anxiety and pain.

And for what?

I get why the rich do it.

The rich have no intention of paying jobs according to their difficulty or importance.

They need an underpaid workforce in order to profit.

But what's everyone else's excuse for perpetuating this depraved falsehood?

What do YOU get out of it?

Capitalism insists that nobody ever stop to ask these questions, because under scrutiny most of its premises show their absurdity.

Not the least of which is "What is the point of work?"

When you ask what work IS, You realize that it comes in one of two forms -- Essential work (Supplying products and services necessary for functional society) and Non-Essential work (Supplying products and services for convenience, entertainment, aesthetic or merely profit)

The REASONS that we work also come in two forms... Necessity and passion.

What Capitalism routinely works to slide past us is the inane notion that all work is essential (because profit is) and that all work comes from necessity.

In parallel, we set up a society in which most people simply don't have what they need to survive.

We artificially restrict essential products and services to create necessity that forces people to work creating non-essential products or die.

In short, we work so that we can live inside and eat.

That work often does not pay enough to live inside and eat anyway.

Which means more people have to work so that those other people can live inside and eat.

Meanwhile we allocate all the other resources toward a tiny group.

Our American Dream tale demands that a tiny group of people be able to retain all the resources withheld from everyone else.

And then we tell those we withhold from that if they work more and give more to the tiny group, one day, everyone can join it.

It makes no sense.

Regardless of your ideology, when you say it out loud and plain, it just doesn't add up.

Literally.

Whether or not you're OK with this logical and mathematical nonsense because it serves you is a different story altogether.

But like. We can all admit that it's ridiculous.

Capitalism is gonna keep grinding on for some time. That's just a fact.

But we can do the literal bare minimum and stop denigrating people for unemployment or poverty.

We KNOW it's not their fault.

We know better.

So we can just quit it.

If the only way that we can feel secure in our own accomplishments is to knowingly hold others to a bullshit standard that nobody can measure up to, then we really just suck.

We can and should do better.

Be better.

At no real cost.