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Every time I visit my elderly parents I come away with the same reinforced conviction: we are a Rip-off nation, and we’ve just been too inured to the ubiquitous rip-offery to be aware of it anymore.
As I’ve indicated here before, my octogenarian folks are among that increasingly rare breed of Americans who somehow survive without internet or television cable. So instead of the constant bombardment of Spam texts and emails that most people passively ignore with only mild annoyance on a more or less daily basis, they are subject to multiple garbage phone calls and snail mail from various organizations that are not what they claim to be. Because my folks are self-limited to a landline, their phone rings at least ten times a day with junk calls such as the faux “police benefit” organizations. Nearly always male, these callers claim to represent the interests of police officers and their pitch usually consists of fearmongering about crime and poor, poor resource-starved cops. Most of these harassing groups are simply right-wing political organizations with no relationship to the police.
The same is true of several “Wounded veterans” scams, “Medicare advantage” rip-offs, “expired warranty” scams and worthless life insurance sales pitches, all unwanted and annoying intrusions into their daily lives.  Because my parents are elderly, they are prime targets for these hucksters, all of whom are well aware of the age of the person they’re calling through internet-ready demographic records. So they call again and again, taking advantage of the fact that — like millions of others –my folks aren’t savvy enough about their options to block them (I’ve tried to wean them from the landline without success, and they can’t fathom the idea of only using cell phones or even “screening” their calls) It may sound like a minor thing, but it’s actually pretty debilitating, mentally and physically, over time and repetition, on TV and over the phone. 
Four out of every five pieces of snail mail they receive is from one of these types of groups, or something similar, which wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t peculiarly susceptible to such trash.  I can’t tell you how many “prize winning” mails I’ve disposed of that my mom (who suffers from early dementia) has laid out on her dining room table, ready to respond and thereby subject herself to exponentially more of these come-ons. “No, you didn’t win a million dollars, Mom, no you don’t need to adopt a heifer, Mom, no, your car warranty has not expired.”  
These specific scummy people generally won’t bother with me simply because my age demographic indicates I’d be less susceptible to their running cons.  But sometimes they get through: This week it was a long message from “Sundance Vacations” advising me I’d won a contest which I never entered two years ago at a local boat show (I’d attended the show but never entered any contest). Immediately interesting to me was their assurance that I was a big winner, but what I “won” was never described. Of course a few clicks on Yelp suggested the place was a time-share type pushing scam with a host of complaints to the Better Business Bureau. But I wondered how my internet-aversive parents would have responded to the same pitch. Actually I don’t wonder, they’ve already been snookered into at least one such “promotion.”
It’s tempting to ignore the ubiquity of this constant scam-mongering (and I’m not even addressing the “grandparents” scams and their ilk that are the fiendish product of true criminals) as mere background noise, but I’ve come to view it as reflecting a broader scam ethic that now enjoys complete legitimacy in all levels of our society. It’s really not far removed from the myriad advertisements for useless pharmaceuticals that captive viewers are urged to “ask their doctors about.” Or just ads with trendy manufactured muzak trying to be “edgy” and buy some stupid software, pickup truck, or fast-food burger. But what I think I really dislike about our consumer-insatiable culture is this underlying reassurance it conveys that all is right, all is just peachy, edgy and fun, in a country that for all intents and purposes is about to voluntarily descend into fascism, with one of its political parties completely dedicated to dividing people for the profit of it.  
Just this week the ideologically corrupted, conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals (via three Trump-appointed stooges) declared the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau “unconstitutional” because it — like many other federal agencies such as the USPS and Federal Reserve — doesn’t receive its funding through Congressional appropriation. Of course, this is cherry-picked nonsense, concocted because the predatory payday lenders like those who that brought suit in that case are huge donors to the political right. And regulation of such predators would be … unseemly, I guess, for a rip-off nation. 
The internet has had at least one salutary effect: it has permitted Americans to get a glimpse of just how cynical our economic hierarchy is in this country. As Tim Kreider wrote in July for the New York Times:
A new generation has grown to adulthood that’s never known capitalism as a functioning economic system. My generation, X, was the first postwar cohort to be downwardly mobile, but millennials were the first to know it going in. Our country’s oligarchs forgot to maintain the crucial Horatio Alger fiction that anyone can get ahead with hard work — or maybe they just dropped it, figuring we no longer had any choice. Through the internet, we could peer enviously at our neighbors in civilized countries, who get monthlong vacations, don’t have to devote decades to paying for their college degrees, and aren’t terrified of going broke if they get sick. To young people, America seems less like a country than an inescapable web of scams, and “hard work” less like a virtue than a propaganda slogan, inane as “Just say no.”
(emphasis added) 
The COVID-19 pandemic briefly shined a light on the self-perpetuating hamster-wheel mentality our American capitalist system is premised on. Kreider continues:
The pandemic was the bomb cyclone of our discontents; it not only gave all us nonessential workers an experience of mandatory sloth — which, for many, turned out to be not altogether unpleasant — but also dredged up a lakeful of long-submerged truths. It turns out that millions of people never actually needed to waste days of their lives sitting in traffic or pantomime “work” under managerial scrutiny eight hours a day. We learned that nurses, cashiers, truckers and delivery people (who’ve always been too busy to brag about it) actually ran the world and the rest of us were mostly useless supernumeraries. The brutal hierarchies of work shifted, for the first time in recent memory, in favor of labor, and the outraged whines of former social Darwinists were a pleasure to savor.
I remember, almost to the exact moment, when television ads during the pandemic ceased to be “we’re all in this together, and we’re there for you, we care,” and became “now that the past is behind us, it’s time to open up, so come out and spend, spend, spend.” Time to get back on that hamster wheel, and oh, by the way, now we’ve got to charge you twice as much because “inflation.” 
So yeah, I feel bad for my parents. But the sad reality is they’re not going to be around much longer. The folks I really sympathize with are the younger generations, with their impossible rents and the prospect of owning their own homes in this country disappearing, like so much water poured on sand.
The future their elders are preparing to bequeath to them is one that reflects the fondest hopes of the same ignorant bigots a lot of them fled their hometowns to escape. American conservatism, which is demographically terminal and knows it, is acting like a moribund billionaire adding sadistic codicils to his will.
More young people are opting not to have kids not only because they can’t afford them but also because they assume they’ll have only a scorched or sodden wasteland to grow up in.
Even with all this darkness, I remain optimistic, believe it or not. The young people in this country are simply not going to stand around and let their lives be turned into fungible commodities, their hopes and aspirations choked off by the myopia and greed of their parents and grandparents and this corrupted, antiquated and dysfunctional system they’ve foisted on them. The cracks are just too big and glaring to ignore.  I suspect there will be a reckoning, sooner rather than later with this rip-off nation, and I hope I’m alive to see it. Gil Scott-Heron famously told us “The revolution will not be televised.” He was right, I think, just a half century too early.  

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