Sometimes I sit here in the early hours, when the world’s gone quiet and the only thing humming is the refrigerator, and I wonder — when did America stop caring about its own people? When did we start serving the machine instead of the citizen?

If I had to pick a moment, I’d say sometime between Vietnam and Reagan. Maybe around the late 1960s, when the Johnson administration got swallowed by the war it thought it could manage. The Tet Offensive in ’68 didn’t just blow holes in Saigon — it blew holes in the American soul. We were told we were “fighting for freedom,” but the only thing that grew freer were corporate profits and government lies.

Vietnam wasn’t just a bad war; it was the blueprint for how the powerful learned to profit from the pain of ordinary people. The same factories that made cars started making napalm. The same politicians who promised prosperity sent working-class kids to die in jungles for nothing.

Then came Nixon, who turned the politics of division into a national sport. The “Southern Strategy” was a poison pill that told white America their real enemy wasn’t Wall Street — it was their neighbor. That trick still works today.

By the time Reagan came along, the sellout was complete. The 1980s were a smiling con job — trickle-down economics, deregulation, the death of unions, and a thousand ways to say “you’re on your own.” Government went from being the public’s defender to the corporate enforcer. And people cheered it on, because they’d been told “freedom” meant no safety net and “patriotism” meant buying what you couldn’t afford.

The 1990s sealed the deal. Clinton — who talked like a liberal and governed like a banker — doubled down on the same nonsense. NAFTA, welfare reform, financial deregulation — all of it dressed up as progress, all of it bleeding the poor and padding the rich. When the 2008 crash hit, Washington rushed to save the banks and left Main Street to rot.

We’ve been walking around dazed ever since. The 2010s gave us Occupy and Trump — two sides of the same coin, both screaming that the system is broken. And it is. The left tried to fix it with decency; the right tried to burn it down. Now we’re all standing in the smoke wondering what the hell happened.

Somewhere along the way, the United States stopped being a society and started being a marketplace. The flag still flies, but it’s mostly a brand logo now. And when I look back, I can’t help but think — we’ve been out of step with our own people for a long damn time. Maybe since Johnson. Maybe since Tet. Maybe since we learned to trade empathy for profit.

The real question isn’t when it happened anymore. The question is whether we’ll ever have the guts to fix it.

References (APA Style)

Johnson, L. B. (1964–1968). Presidential addresses and public papers. U.S. Government Printing Office.
Reagan, R. (1981–1989). Public papers of the presidents of the United States. National Archives and Records Administration.
Clinton, W. J. (1993–2001). Public papers of the presidents of the United States. National Archives and Records Administration.
Stiglitz, J. E. (2012). The price of inequality: How today’s divided society endangers our future. W.W. Norton & Company.
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. Harvard University Press.
Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. Metropolitan Books.
Zinn, H. (2005). A people’s history of the United States. Harper Perennial.