The Harsh Truth

By Brittany Wetklow / Winter 2023

When I was a kid, I always dreamt about what my life would be like by the time I became an adult. I would imagine myself with a big family and a great paying job while living in a beautiful home. You could say I was picturing the ideal ‘American Dream’ that we have all hoped for at some point in our lives.

America’s capitalistic society has always been highly admired, especially in my family. I grew up in a fairly conservative household. My dad was a firefighter and my mom worked in IT so we were able to live pretty comfortably. My parents worked hard and saved their money to give my brother and I a privileged life. I lived in a gated community in the house at the top of the hill of my small town. My parents were some of the select few that were able to work their way up the ranks in order to survive in society, so I had no reason to believe that the American Dream was out of my reach. However, my privileged childhood gave me unrealistic expectations that make it difficult to picture my future in any other way than how I originally grew up viewing the world.

Let me explain what I mean. I was always told to be grateful that I live in America because of all the opportunities at my fingertips. I fully believed that to get where you wanted to be in life, all you had to do was work hard and everything would fall into place. It all sounds so simple. It made me wonder if it was so easy, then why are there people who can’t afford food, clean water, or shelter? I was told that the people who fell through the cracks of the system were completely to blame because they were either lazy or didn’t try hard enough to achieve their goals. Little did I know how much my views would change when I turned eighteen and moved out of that small town of deception. It wasn’t until then that I would learn what it is like to be the one who falls through the cracks.

When I moved to San Diego, the lens in which I had been viewing society was changed forever. At first, I was eager to be living in San Diego on my own. Finally getting the chance to be an independent adult and start working towards my own ‘American Dream’. I always pictured myself living near the beach, but I didn’t fully comprehend just how expensive that would be. The cost of living in San Diego is significantly more than where I grew up. So as you can imagine, I was shocked to learn that it would cost $1000+ a month for rent just to share a room in student housing with 5 other roommates. Yes, this was shocking but I didn’t let that change my mind.  I told myself that if other people my age could afford living here while going to college, then there was no reason why I couldn’t too.  

Just when I started to get comfortable with juggling two jobs while going to school, that’s when the pandemic hit.  2020 was the year that lives changed for many all around the world, including mine. When Covid-19 first made its impact, I was working as a sales associate at 24 hour fitness and a medic in the Army National Guard. Simultaneously, I was taking a full course load at Mesa College with hopes of becoming a nurse one day. News broke that we were going to be shutting down for a few weeks in order to stop the spread of the virus.

When I heard the news, I was overjoyed to finally be getting a break from work and school. However, I did not fully understand how my life would change at that moment in time. A few weeks went by as the shut down continued, when I received a phone call from my commanding officer in the California Army National Guard. I was informed that my whole unit was being activated for an unknown amount of time. For context, I belong to a unit called Med Det which is fully equipped with medical personnel such as medics, nurses, physician assistants, dentists, and dental technicians. I had been working as a medic for 3 years at this point, but I had never been put on a mission for longer than a week. It’s safe to say, I had no idea what the next few months would look like.

We were tasked to help the nurses and certified nursing assistants who had been working in various nursing homes around Los Angeles. Many of these employees had been diagnosed with Covid-19 along with the patients residing there due to the lack of PPE during the height of the pandemic. We were called to attempt to alleviate their workload by assisting with various duties such as feeding the patients, changing the linens and undergarments, administering IVs, and most importantly spending time with the patients. Nursing homes during this time were not allowing visitors under any circumstances, so naturally the patients were lonely and distraught. The nursing home that I was assigned to had designated sections to identify who was already positive for covid, who was most at risk for getting covid, and people not at risk. Since we were not technically employees there, we were only allowed to treat the patients who were not at risk. Despite that fact, covid is so contagious that patients would need to be moved daily because their status would change so rapidly. Whether or not they were considered “at risk” didn’t really matter because at the end of the day we were all at risk.

After getting to know these patients it was devastating to come into work the next day seeing an empty bed where they normally resided. The outcome of their health was completely out of our hands which created a feeling of helplessness for medical personnel. We are supposed to be saving lives yet our own lives are being put at stake for the sake of the overall community. Thinking about how the people who passed away were unable to spend their last moments of life with their loved ones was absolutely heartbreaking. It made me sad to think about my own family. Not only was I worried about them too, but it had been months since I had seen them. None of this seemed fair or humane.

I was not familiar with the term ‘essential workers’ before the start of the pandemic. I wondered why the government would praise us for our bravery and solitude, but refused to provide us with the proper protective equipment and compensation we needed. After three months of being away from my family and living in a hotel room, it’s unfortunately not surprising that I developed severe depression and anxiety. I was finally released from the mission because of my mental state as well as the fact that my apartment lease was coming to an end back in San Diego.

By the time I arrived back home, things slowly began to reopen. I felt a sense of relief and I was excited to get back to my civilian job. Sadly, I had some bad news waiting for me when I returned to San Diego. My manager from 24 hour fitness told me to attend a tele-meeting involving the future of the company. Basically, half of us on the first call were told that we were being let go because the company was going bankrupt, and the other half on the other call were able to keep their jobs. Unfortunately, I was on the first call. I did not understand what I did wrong and why we were not made aware of the circumstances sooner. Maybe then I could have started looking for a new job at the very least. How did they make this decision of who could stay and who should leave? It almost felt as if they drew names out of a hat in order to determine our fate.

At that moment, I began to understand why a majority of us are left behind in the chase to get to the top. Somehow, after working myself to death and putting my health and sanity aside for months, I was met with unemployment. How could this happen? I did everything right. I worked hard, I put my job above everything else. The time that I could have spent with my family was spent caring for the families of others. All that just to be replaced without a second thought. The beliefs I once had about capitalistic society suddenly vanished. I couldn’t justify the individual-based culture any longer. I began to realize that just because you are a hard-worker doesn’t mean that you will achieve the American Dream.

To be completely blunt, if reaching the American Dream means becoming a part of the elite 1%, the odds are that none of us will ever even come close to that. The truth is, “if you saved $10,000 a day since the building of the pyramids in Egypt you would have only one-fifth the average fortune of the 5 richest billionaires” (Oxfam, 6). So why is it that we accept our fate in this society knowing that a majority of us will never come close to the salary of the elites? Why is it that while many of us were struggling to survive during the pandemic, the billionaires of our nation were somehow getting richer? According to this article, Bezos Gains $24 Billion in 2020 While World Battles Pandemic - Bloomberg Jeff Bezos became $24 billion dollars richer amid the pandemic while many essential workers received little to no pay increase at all. Not to mention, the unemployed population of the United States who were laid off were only given a $1200 stimulus check that took months to even arrive. Meanwhile, other countries' stimulus packages ranged from 70-80% of their workers’ original salaries or $1000-2000 dollars each month (Kaplan). Why do we continue to defend capitalism with the hope that one day we will eventually become a billionaire too?

Well, part of it has to do with the fact that many of us have been sold this ideology for hundreds of years. Whether we are conscious of it or not, a sense of competition is always present in our society. This sense of competition is a distraction tactic used to keep the elite at the top while the working class pays the price. For instance, this article describing the Gilded Age shows the idea that the greedy bankers and politicians (aka the elite) of the U.S. were notorious for taking advantage of the working class even back in the 1800s. The sad thing is that we are manipulated into believing that we are in competition with each other in order to keep this money-addicted society running. The looming fear that someone will always be more qualified for a position than you are, or that you can’t quit the job you hate because you need the money more than the company needs you. That intimidation is constantly circulating through the mind of every American.

There is a reason why we are trained to believe that competition is normal. The simple answer is control. If we all understood the truth about the system, we would therefore be considered unpredictable. One mind recognizing the problem is nothing to worry about, however a million minds recognizing the problem could create chaos or rebellion. Howard Zinn said it best in this quote, “Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is. And so, the schools, the churches, the popular literature taught that to be rich was a sign of superiority, to be poor a sign of personal failure, and that the only way upward for a poor person was to climb into the ranks of the rich by extraordinary effort and extraordinary luck” (Howard Zinn).

I was blinded by this control tactic of the capitalistic society up until the events of 2020. Everything is centered around money, and our lives and wellbeing don’t matter to the companies that we spend so much time of our lives working for. People who were once considered essential workers can be laid off at the drop of a hat. The pandemic proved that the government is perfectly capable of providing us with stimulus checks during a crisis. It should not take a global pandemic as justification for people to receive basic necessities.

Even before the pandemic the harsh truth was that 140 million people are considered poor or low income, 700 people die each day from poverty, and 4 million people cannot buy clean water. (Rev. Barber) There is no reason why we have multitudes of people struggling every day while the elite few have more money than they can even spend in their lifetime. The distribution of wealth and power in the United States leaves middle and lower class workers feeling constant instability when it comes to the state of their employment. The bottom line is that everyone should have the right to job security if they take the time to work. There is no reason why hard-working people should ever feel disposable.

One day, I dream that we as a whole can collectively come together to abolish this individualist, competitive control tactic used to pin us against each other. My hope is that at the very least we can stop blaming ourselves for the lack of support in this society. We are not responsible for the severed social safety net in this system. We are not failures. Every human being on the planet has something more to offer than their work ethic. Our place in society shouldn’t be determined by the amount of money in our pockets or by our willingness to spend our whole lives working to survive. We need to diminish the thought that we are alone in this world and obliterate the individualistic culture. It will be the moment that we come together where we’ll be the strongest. 

Works Cited

Barber. (2020, March 13). Supplemental poverty measure. Institute for Policy Studies. Retrieved March 24, 2023.

Alexander, S., Maloney, T., & Metcalf, T. (2020, April 14). Bezos gains $24 billion in 2020 while world battles pandemic. Bloomberg.com. Retrieved March 24, 2023.

Zinn, H., & Arnove, A. (2017). A people's history of the United States. Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers.

Kaplan, J. (n.d.). 14 countries that are paying their workers during quarantine - and how they compare to America's $1,200 stimulus checks. Business Insider. Retrieved March 24, 2023.

Gilded age - history. (n.d.). Retrieved March 25, 2023.

Time to care: Unpaid and Underpaid Care Work and the global inequality crisis. Oxfam Policy & Practice. (n.d.). Retrieved March 25, 2023.