America Has Failed: A Portrait of a Country That Abandoned Its Own

America’s great myth is that it takes care of its people. We wave flags, chant “freedom,” and exalt our supposed exceptionalism, but the reality is far bleaker. For decades now, this country has abandoned the very idea of collective responsibility. The systems that once promised to safeguard the public have been gutted, commodified, or outright weaponized against the people they claim to serve. The evidence is everywhere, and it is staggering.

This essay is only a brief glimpse at a far more alarming reality. I explore these issues in depth in my book Unseen Chains, but what follows serves as a kind of distilled warning, a set of cliff notes that should be more than enough to raise the alarm.

Housing: Shelter as Investment, Not a Right

Start with housing, a necessity as fundamental as clean air, yet treated as a speculative market. Rents have risen nearly twentyfold since the early twentieth century, outpacing wages at every turn. The average rent today hovers above $1,500 a month and is projected to rise further. Families live one paycheck away from eviction, and half a million people sleep unhoused each night. Meanwhile, corporations and investors sit on millions of empty homes, hoarding them as “assets.” In Los Angeles, entire luxury apartment complexes remain vacant while tent encampments sprawl just blocks away. Shelter has been transformed from a human right into a commodity, and the nation shrugs.

Healthcare: Survival as a Business Model

The same indifference defines our approach to health. We boast of world-class hospitals and advanced medicine, yet we are the only wealthy nation where a hospital stay can bankrupt a family. Twenty million Americans carry medical debt totaling more than $220 billion. Each year, about 650,000 people are pushed into bankruptcy because they got sick. A mother in Nevada was billed nearly $740,000 for her baby’s NICU stay, down to line items for Vaseline and bandages. Another family in Texas received a $13,000 bill for their kindergartener’s eye surgery after insurance arbitrarily declined coverage. Maternal mortality rates in the U.S. are worse than in countries with a fraction of our wealth, with Black women dying at nearly three times the rate of white women. And still, policymakers treat healthcare as an industry to be mined for profit, not a system to safeguard life.

Childcare: Poverty Engineered

Childcare is another indictment. In thirty-eight states and D.C., the cost of infant care now exceeds public college tuition. In some states, childcare even costs more than rent. Parents must choose between working to afford care and quitting to provide it themselves, an impossible bind engineered by a society that refuses to support families. In Washington, D.C., infant care averages more than $28,000 a year, outpacing most salaries in the city. This is not a glitch in the system; it is the system, a machine that drives families into generational poverty and raises children in households defined by scarcity and stress.

Wages and Inequality: Growth for Whom?

All this is compounded by stagnant wages. Since the late 1970s, productivity has soared, yet workers’ pay has barely moved. Between 1980 and 2022, the bottom ninety percent saw only 36% wage growth, while the top 0.1% pocketed gains of over 300%. CEOs now earn nearly 400 times what their workers do. Meanwhile, Americans are told to be grateful for survival, to accept the myth that hard work equals upward mobility, even as the rungs of the ladder have been sawed off. This is not an accident; it is the architecture of an economy designed to reward hoarding at the top and to normalize precarity at the bottom.

Gun Violence: The Children’s Graveyard

The cruelty extends beyond the wallet into daily life. Gun violence kills nearly 47,000 Americans each year. For children and teens, firearms are now the leading cause of death; seven children a day, their lives ended in school shootings, street crossfire, or preventable suicides. In Uvalde, police stood idle for more than an hour while children were slaughtered inside their classroom. The government responded not by restricting guns but by sending “thoughts and prayers.” The U.S. tolerates a level of bloodshed among its own youth that no other wealthy nation allows. We bury our children and move on as if it were normal.

Transportation: A Trap Masquerading as Freedom

Transportation reveals another trap. With decayed public transit and sprawling urban design, car dependency isn’t a choice but a mandate. Families spend over $13,000 a year on transportation, the second-largest household expense after housing. For low-income households, that can swallow 30% of income. In cities like Miami, transportation costs have doubled in a decade, locking workers into debt just to get to their jobs. Cars, once marketed as the ultimate symbol of freedom, have become shackles of financial servitude, extracting wealth from the poor while rewarding oil companies and auto lenders. Mobility, the very thing required to access jobs, schools, and healthcare, is itself a financial chokehold.

Prescription Drugs: Profit Over Life

And even where medicine exists, it is priced out of reach. Prescription drugs in America cost nearly three times what they do in comparable nations. Insulin, discovered a century ago and sold for $1 a vial in the 1920s, now costs hundreds of dollars per dose. Ozempic, marketed as a diabetes and weight-loss drug, is priced at over $1,000 a month here but sells for under $100 in Canada and Europe. People ration doses, skip treatments, or die, not because the science doesn’t exist, but because profiteers decided survival should come with a surcharge. In no other developed nation is medicine treated as a luxury item.

Paid Leave: Even Recovery Denied

Layer onto all of this the absence of paid family leave. Nearly three-quarters of American workers have none, with the poorest left almost entirely uncovered. Parents are forced back to work days after giving birth. Workers lose wages or jobs when they fall sick. In no other wealthy country are people punished so severely simply for having families, for being human. The richest nation in history refuses its citizens even the dignity of recovery, sending a clear message: you are a cog in the machine, replaceable the moment you falter.

The Deliberate Abandonment

Taken together, these crises paint a picture of a country that has not simply failed to care for its own but has deliberately abandoned them. This isn’t mismanagement, it’s design: a system that prioritizes profit over people, perception over substance, markets over human life. We are told to believe in American greatness even as the evidence piles up that our nation’s social contract has long been shredded.

The truth is, America has stopped caring for its people. It has for a while. And unless we name this neglect for what it is, systemic cruelty dressed up as freedom, it will only deepen. The question is whether we continue to normalize abandonment, or whether we finally admit that a society that leaves millions hungry, sick, bankrupt, and dead from preventable causes is not a society worth defending.