As Squid Game Season 2 is arriving later this year (2024!), I rewatched some of the first incredibly successful season of Squid Game, and couldn't help feel myself getting sucked in emotionally by the depths of despairs that the main characters suffer, mainly due to their lack of wealth, whether it be due to bad business investments, bad gambling habits, bad bosses, etc., their problems were caused by money and lack of it. It's telling that the 2 most successful cinematic successes in Korea, Parasite the movie, and Squid Game the TV series, both center on the theme of class inequality and wealth inequality. It's apparently a problem in South Korea, but it's also a problem in the U.S., China, literally every single country in the world. Wherever there are people, the wealthiest people want to stay rich, so the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. One of the most heartbreaking sequences in Squid Game is Episode 2, AFTER participating in the Red Light Green Light game and knowing of the full consequences of losing, Giheung goes back to real society and finds himself begging for money to help fund surgery for his diabetic mother, who can't afford the surgery because Giheung had sold the money for health insurance. How many people in the world have been placed in a similar situation and can resonate with that feeling? Unfortunately it is not a rare feeling in today's world, where many many people have to suffer so that a few people can live their dreams and make all the money they've ever wanted in the world. And it's not just because the wealthy people worked hard and deserved it more, that's a tiny drop of water in the pool of factors that make one rich, or poor enough to be desperate to ask one's ex-wife to help finance the surgery. It's devastating but very very real, as far as I can tell from visiting different communities in the U.S. and everywhere. The real world is so much different from what's depicted on TV of celebrities, parties, people having fun, luxury yachts; the real world is a world of thankless jobs, corporate bureacracy, paying for your mortgage and insurnace, dealing with mean bosses, paying money to coporations that don't care anything about you except your money.
I can just so many of those interactions in Squid Game actually happening in real life, arguing vehemently about money, promising things you can't promise, being so far into debt there's no coming back from it, life is just miserable for those people. And it's more common than people think.
In an election season that's turned really weird, I'm as disillusioned as ever about all these power-hungry people running for public office who want more power, to make themselves more famous and powerful and asking normal citizens for money to fund their campaign to get elected so they can be more powerful. All they want is your vote! It's just the same as companies running advertisements: all they want is your money. Some companies specifically benefit off of your inability to pay back your loans by charging usury-level rates. Basically rich people benefiting off of poor people, the rich robbing the poor to give to the rich.
Today my parents and I went to a few open houses around the Los Angeles areas to see what kind of real estate money can buy....and the basic premise is, if you want anything that is livable in a decent neighborhood with amenities and working functions, it starts at a million dollars. Seriously, a million dollars. Not even counting property taxes, paying the realtors, condo association costs, repairs, redoing the carpet for some of these places, the starting price is just right there..... a million dollars. It's just an absurd amount for a normal house, and obviously it's that high because it's L.A. and inflation and a conglomeration of reasons, but the cold hard truth staring you in the face at the end is that price tag of a million dollars, something I thought basically made you rich when I was a kid. Now it just makes you an in-debt homeowner in Southern California. I make a pretty good salary way above the median salary in the U.S., and even I balked at the price; how does a normal person afford a house nowadays? It's just a product of the wealthy buying up all the best things in life (SoCal weather, good neighborhoods, near Trader Joe's, etc., etc.) and buying at high prices, and leaving the scraps for the rest of the world at inflated prices. That's the world we live in now, and if left unchecked it only gets worse. That's MY number 1 issue in this election, and I don't think based on either candidate just firing emotion-based and personality attacks against the other, that we're gonna get it. Because hey, the politicians are part of that wealthier class, what incentive do they have to change the system to take themselves down?
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