I am very sorry to hear your rage and I am truly sorry the life it has left you with.

And I get it. This country (the good ole USA) has betrayed you and millions. Both parties, but primarily the republican party has misled this country into believing in the “magic of markets”, free trade, rugged individualism, and the supremacy of “the American experiment”. And forgot the objective that its project should have been to secure decent lives for all Americans.

All of it is ideological nonsense and of a different kind that what misled Russians and Eastern Europeans and all sorts of others to believe in something other than plain old empirical analysis and questioning your own suppositions.

I was enlightened most of all during my years working in Germany in the 80’s. At that time, the right wing’s version of Lenin, Ronald Reagan was riding high. But so was the German economy and my first employer there, Daimler-Benz AG was also making big strides into the US market and awareness of the superiority of its products. I was never a believer in US “superiority” and watched in the 70s and 80s as Japan also rolled over US industry. And wondered why as I sat in my job aiding and abetting the first car company on earth to design a car body entirely electronically from scratch… using French CAD/CAM software, American computers (IBM, Cray) and German software engineering and car manufacturing methods.

And I wondered why America couldn’t do this first. There was a lot of enlightenment that began then, that ran the gamut of reading the preposterous critique by McKinsey Global Report vaunting the superior efficiencies the American use of capital to the start of the attacks on AirBus for daring to take state subsidies (as if the U.S. Defense sector didn’t exist). And on and on.

I came back in the 90’s to an America that looked like it was climbing up to a “new economic model” of perpetual prosperity from the acceleration to Dot Com 1. I was at the center of it at 3 companies, one of which forms the foundation of the wealth of Google (which bought it), Facebook, Twitter and all the rest of the ad-driven web.

And then I went to Wall Street and got to see the absurdities and virtues of our financial system in all their glories.

And then I went into Blockchain and crpyto. And China. And just saw a different version arise of what has gone before whenever this country’s people try to gimmick their way out of the hard work (as most of Norther Europe learned from the wars there) of building good clean democracies devoted to the well-being of all their citizens.

So, I get that so many Americans like yourself feel betrayed and empowered by Crypto and Gamestop and Robinhood and so on. But, this will also end in tears unless enough people vote for it not to.

My hope is, however, that the problems and the dangers and those who will likely end up the real winners again will not turn America into just another failed democracy.

Good luck to you and use your winnings wisely.