Strategic Value Realization

What you’re about to read is a piece I wrote a long time ago. A rant I kept sitting on, telling myself it wasn’t worth posting because it would just piss people off, even if every word of it was honest. Turns out, I’m done sitting on it. Not because I’m interested in mindlessly shitting on this country—my home, where I was born and raised—but because saying this out loud might actually resonate with people who feel the same way and have been told they’re crazy for it. Maybe it snaps a few folks out of the smug, self-congratulatory stupor of American greatness and forces a moment of reflection about what we’re actually doing to this place. And if nothing else, I finally stopped censoring myself and let something loose that’s been rattling around in my head for far too long. Read it or don’t. Either way, I’m done holding it back. Enjoy, or don’t.

You ever just look around and think, Wow, this place fucking sucks? Not in some mild, “Oh, this could use some improvement” way, but in a full-blown, “Jesus Christ, how did we manage to fuck up literally every square inch of livable space?” kind of way. Because that’s exactly where I’m at.

America is not some majestic land of amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties. That’s the brochure version. That’s the theory of America. The reality is an endless, suffocating, depressing hellscape of cracked pavement, Dollar General parking lots, and a thousand variations of the same miserable, gray, lifeless corporate husk pretending to be a town. You like Applebee’s? Fantastic news. We’ve got forty thousand of them, all within two miles of each other. And if you drive a little farther, congratulations, you’ve unlocked the next level of suburban dystopia: the Walmart Supercenter. Don’t get too excited. It looks exactly like the last five you passed, except this one has even more dead-eyed employees quietly questioning their life choices under fluorescent lights that hum like a nuclear reactor about to melt down.

And the buildings. Oh my god, the fucking buildings. We used to build things with character, charm, and actual human creativity. Now we get strip malls that look like they were designed by an AI trained exclusively on abandoned Sears catalogs. Everywhere you look, it’s the same goddamn soulless, rectangular beige stucco boxes. A capitalist concentration camp where every storefront is either a nail salon, a vape shop, or a payday loan center. You could pick one of these miserable prefab structures up, drop it into any town in America, and no one would notice. Even the street numbers are in the same font everywhere. At least pretend you tried. Slap on a gargoyle. Paint it a color that doesn’t scream “late-stage empire in decline.” Something.

And if you think the suburbs are bad, take a scenic drive through rural America. What a fucking treat. Flat, brown nothingness. An endless, uninspired tract of dirt dotted with grain silos and broken-down trucks sitting in yards like tombstones for dreams that died three generations ago. The only thing more common than meth labs out there are people insisting that is the “Real America,” as if that somehow makes the crushing despair more wholesome. News flash: “Real America” is just corporate serfdom with shittier internet.

And I know what some people are thinking as they read this. “But what about the national parks?” Oh yes, the national parks. Our tiny, government-mandated reservations of actual beauty, preserved just enough to remind us what this place used to look like before capitalism turned everything into one giant fucking strip mall. Congratulations, America. We managed to save about four percent of the land from becoming a gas station or warehouse. Here’s the thing: we don’t live in the national parks. Nobody’s commuting to work in fucking Yellowstone. We live in the in-between spaces. And those are all mostly a nightmare.

Speaking of nightmares, let’s talk about the roads. Ever see a European city with charming cobblestone streets, public plazas, and pedestrian zones designed for human beings instead of vehicles? Good luck finding that here. Instead, you get endless cracked asphalt, potholes deep enough to bury a body in, and sidewalks that start and stop at random like they were installed as a joke. Ever try to walk anywhere in America? It’s like playing real-life Frogger, except the prize for winning is you still live here.

Public transit? Forget it. Unless you live in one of maybe five major cities, you’re chained to your car like a modern-day coal miner, endlessly crawling through bumper-to-bumper traffic past billboards for the eighteenth new mattress company this year. Other countries have bullet trains and maglevs flying hundreds of miles an hour. Meanwhile, Amtrak is still trying to hit sixty without derailing.

And before some bootlicker pipes up with, “Well, you should appreciate what we have,” appreciate what, exactly? The endless undifferentiated sprawl of commercial zoning? The architectural wasteland of identical chain stores and fast-food joints, each one as lifeless and interchangeable as the last? Suburbs that look like they were rendered by a PlayStation 2 graphics engine? Or maybe I should admire our “historic” districts, stripped of all character and replaced with luxury apartments that cost $2,500 a month for the privilege of living above a Chipotle.

And I’m still not done, because you know what else there’s an endless supply of in this bleak hellscape? Bars and churches. Everywhere. Like some fucking sick cosmic joke about America’s collective coping mechanisms. The bars are either corporate “grill & pub” shitholes designed for divorced dads pounding Coors Light under forty-seven flat screens, or they’re run-down relics from the ’70s where you can smell the nicotine soaked into the walls and the bartender hasn’t smiled since the first Gulf War.

And the churches. Jesus Christ, the churches. You’d think houses of worship, places supposedly meant to honor divinity and uplift the spirit, would at least look inspiring. Majestic. Transcendent. Lol Nope. Instead we get soulless concrete megachurch warehouses that look like abandoned Best Buys, or decaying old churches with signs missing letters like a half-assed Wheel of Fortune puzzle. And you’d think, with this many churches, compassion and morality would be overflowing in this country. Lmao. WRONG.

Because when it comes to actually helping people, following those little Jesus teachings about feeding the hungry, helping the poor, loving thy fucking neighbor? Oh no. That’s socialism. That’s woke bullshit. In America, if you’re poor, sick, or struggling, tough shit. If there’s no profit incentive in helping you, you can go fuck yourself. The same people screaming about Christian values are the first ones whining about their tax dollars helping “lazy welfare bums.” The real American religion isn’t Christianity, or freedom, or democracy. It’s money. Worship it, or get trampled.

That’s why this place looks the way it does. Because natural beauty doesn’t turn a profit. Because authentic history and culture take too long to monetize. Because if it doesn’t have a dollar sign attached, America does not give a single solitary fuck.

People wonder why everyone in America is miserable. Why the streets are flooded with antidepressants, alcohol, suicides, and mindless doom-scrolling.

Just take one look at the endless highways, the Applebee’s-ridden hellscapes, the plastic-clad McSuburbs, and the corporate-branded dystopia of America. It’s a strip mall built on top of a landfill built on top of a cemetery of those exterminated to make it all happen.

Land of the branded, home of the complacent.