Coming back to capitalism is like walking into a brick wall.  It’s like being hurled into the middle ages.  It’s like returning from the future to a place where everyone thinks it was just a dream you had and you say, “No really, I was in a country without advertising, where all the doctors are free and anyone who wants to can go to graduate school without going into debt, and people say ‘we’ a lot more than they say ‘I,’” and you keep feeling like you’re talking in a language no-one understands.  Coming back to capitalism after three months out from under is like walking into a horror movie.  In this country, my neighbor can spray pesticides in his back yard and even if it gives me seizures, the right to private property overrules my right to health, and the worst thing is that it seems self-evident to him that it should be so.  In this country my last ambulance ride costs twice as much as my rent.

Many years ago I heard an activist from another country, somewhere with dictators and soldiers in the streets, say that in the U.S. everyone lived in a fog of confusion, that they couldn’t see reality. It gave her the creeps. She would much rather, she said, be in her own country, where people knew what they were fighting for and against.  And that was 25 years ago.  Late stage capitalism has eroded people’s humanity, has trashed the quality of people’s lives so much that we’re become accustomed to livinginhell.  People in Cuba spoke to me with such compassion about Users.  They said, “We know how much the people of the US must suffer.  Is it true, “ they would ask, “that people don’t know their neighbors?  I heard that no one meets your eye when you walk down the street.  Is it really like that?”