The Moon That Never Rose

“America’s greatest promise is that something is going to happen, and after awhile you get tired of waiting because nothing happens to people except that they grow old and nothing happens to American art, either, because America is the story of the moon that never rose.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The United States of America, my country, the land that I have loved despite its imperfections and failings, a nation that has long projected itself as the gold standard of democratic governance, economic freedom, and human dignity, is not. We now face a reckoning that our political class has proven either unwilling or unable to confront, and voters who have lost control of the government, or are choosing not to exercise it. The evidence has accumulated across decades of policy failure and institutional neglect, and it paints a portrait not of a shining city on a hill, but of a society in measurable, documented decline. No rational person can consider our present circumstances and consider otherwise.

On any given night, approximately 700,000 Americans sleep on the streets. We might reasonably expect such a situation in a developing economy that is still finding its footing, but in the wealthiest nation in the history of human civilization? Alongside the unhoused, in the shadows of that wealth, four in ten American adults cannot absorb a mere $400 emergency expense without borrowing money or selling something. There is no denying that is a financial fragility that exposes the mythological nature of American middle-class prosperity. U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders has repeatedly pointed out the contradictions presented by this nation’s great wealth and dramatic poverty, “We are the wealthiest nation in the history of the world,” he has said, “Yet we have more income and wealth inequality than almost any other major country.”

The American healthcare system certainly deserves a chapter of its own in any honest audit of our national failure. Medical debt has become the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States, which is a distinction shared by no other developed nation on earth. I came close to personal bankruptcy during a series of nine complex eye operations because I was self-employed and could only afford casualty insurance, which left 70% of the costs as my burden. Consider insulin as another example of our health care’s abominable delivery system, a drug invented in 1921 and deliberately not patented by its discoverers so that it would remain affordable; it now costs American patients more than a monthly car payment. People ration it and often die managing shortages.

Meanwhile, women experiencing miscarriages have been left to deteriorate in hospital parking garages because physicians, paralyzed by the legal exposure created by sweeping abortion restrictions, have delayed or withheld standard obstetric care. There are cities here in Texas that have tried to make it a crime to drive through their jurisdictions if you are taking a woman to another state where abortion is legal. Also in Texas, your neighbor can sue you for $10,000 if they discover you have assisted a woman in getting an abortion. The anecdotes are too numerous to list or detail, but they are documented, recurring outcomes.

The nation that calls itself “the land of the free” also incarcerates more of its own citizens than any country on earth, which means more than China, more than Russia, and more than North Korea. Yeah, North Korea. Approximately two million people are currently held in American cages, and roughly a quarter of them have not been convicted of any crime. They await trial. They remain imprisoned, in many cases, because they cannot afford bail. It is, in effect, a wealth tax on liberty. Here in Texas, we disproportionately imprison Blacks at a rate ranging from 1600-1900 per 100,000. Hispanics are incarcerated at 500-700 per 100,000 while Whites are 300-400 per 100,000. The disparity is much more stark when it is considered that Blacks make up only around 12% of the Texas population and Whites are around 40 percent, which means, bluntly, if you are Black in Texas you are much more likely to end up behind bars than a White person.

The data on American longevity tells what might be our saddest story. Life expectancy in the United States is declining in a reversal almost without precedent in the developed world. The U.S. now records an infant mortality rate worse than Cuba’s. Dr. Ashish Jha, former White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator, confronted our great failing with scientific bluntness. “The United States spends more on healthcare than any other nation and gets worse outcomes,” he said.

The paradox is structural, has no connection to misfortune, and is, instead, a consequence of deliberate political choices.

In American schools, children rehearse responses to mass shootings between academic lessons, conducting active shooter exercises as routinely as fire drills. The nation’s minimum wage has not increased in fifteen years. Teachers hold second jobs to make rent. Veterans, having returned from twenty-year wars, sleep beneath bridges. And the nation spent, by conservative estimate, a trillion dollars prosecuting a war in Afghanistan, a country that did not attack us. That war ended in the early hours of a summer morning, with American forces withdrawing without notifying our allies and leaving behind the chaos we had promised to resolve. In our present vile pursuit of immigrants, we are rounding up Afghanis who put their lives at risk by helping our troops in exchange for legal residency here. They face almost certain death in deportation to their home country.

I can’t prompt these hypocrisies without bringing up Greenland. Any comparison between that island of happy folks and this troubled land is supremely audacious. Greenland operates with universal healthcare, and citizens receive free college education. The incarceration rate is among the lowest in the world. No one in Greenland goes bankrupt because they became ill. No one is turned away from emergency care because an insurance company issued a denial. To characterize such a society as poorly run, which our president did from his position on a pedestal of institutional collapse, can hardly be considered a political critique but something more like gaslighting or projection.

I’ll mention also NATO because the current resident of the gold-trimmed White House is threatening to abandon the treaty that has held together the Post War world. The claim that the alliance failed the United States and it was absent in a moment of need sort of demands a confrontation with historical record. Following the September 11 attacks, NATO invoked Article 5 of its founding charter for the first and only time in the alliance’s history. The use of the charter in that manner was for this country. Soldiers from dozens of member nations deployed to Afghanistan, fought alongside American forces, and died in a war that was not theirs. Non-NATO nations, including those as distant as Australia, committed troops and resources for twenty years in solidarity with an ally. The alliance did not abandon Americans and their defense. The US, however, left, unilaterally, without notice, in the middle of the night, and our allies had to absorb the consequences.

We were once a great nation that genuinely aspired to lead, but in an angry political process filled with lies, accusations, and corporate cash, we abandoned introspection and stopped looking honestly at ourselves. Our problems cannot be blamed on fate or geography. They are the consequence of choices made by elected officials, sustained by political inertia of our citizenship, and obscured by nationalist mythology that has turned the phrase “American exceptionalism” into a punch line. Americans have long refused to own our history; we first deny it and then rewrite the parts we don’t like. Even if we could find a mirror big enough to reflect all our contradictions and hypocrisies, I suspect we no longer have the courage to look into it and confront our truth.