Watching the No Kings Day protests sweep through cities and towns across the United States this weekend, I couldn’t help thinking about how deeply we’ve been conditioned to accept less. Millions of people took to the streets to demand change, but behind all that energy lies a truth we rarely say out loud: we’ve been taught to settle, to stay quiet, to be grateful for scraps.
A couple of days ago, while scrolling through my social media, I came across a short video that really hit me. A man calling himself the Grumpy Chinese Guy (Neil Zhu) looked into the camera and said, “Seven million people, 2,500 cities and towns, No Kings Day. I respect the movement. But what are you going to do tomorrow? What’s next?”
It’s a great question, and he’s right to ask it. I am thrilled to see Americans taking to the streets to protest. Protesting feels good. It makes people feel brave and united. But… if there are no demands and no clear goals, little to nothing changes once everyone goes home.
Most of us don’t know how to make demands anymore. We’ve been conditioned to accept less.
How We Were Conditioned to Accept Less
From the time we were kids, we’ve been told to be grateful, to work hard, and to stop complaining. If life is unfair, it’s your fault. If you can’t afford rent, you need to ‘budget better,’ as if the problem is math, not a landlord’s greed. If you can’t pay for healthcare, get another job. We were taught that asking for help is a weakness and that we don’t deserve a minimum of fairness. We were conditioned to accept that free healthcare is a luxury, affordable housing is a dream, and higher education should come with a mountain of debt.
The wealthy who built this system profit handsomely by keeping people quiet, tired, and too busy surviving to question it. They tell us there’s no money for affordable housing, but there’s always money for war – a business that just happens to make them richer; a lot richer. They claim that helping people will “raise taxes” while handing out billions in corporate breaks. They throw around words like “socialism” and “debt” to keep people afraid and to hide the reality that their obscene fortunes depend on everyone else’s labour.
For decades, they’ve sold the lie that government shouldn’t help; that it should “stay out of the way.” But who’s asking why??! The real purpose of government (“for the people, by the people”) is to manage resources and make people’s lives better. A government that protects wealth instead of people isn’t governing. It’s manipulating its citizens and stealing from them.
Breaking the Cycle of Conditioning
We’ve been conditioned to accept less from government altogether. We’re told that working collectively through taxes, public programs, and shared services is somehow wrong. That caring for each other will destroy the economy. But that’s backwards. Cooperation is what keeps an economy alive.
It’s time we ask the real questions: What kind of economy do we have when millions of people are broke, sick, or homeless while a handful of billionaires own everything? Who is the government for? Who is the economy for? Despite how it looks, the system that leaves most people behind isn’t broken at all; it’s working exactly as designed.
Protests can be powerful. They remind people they’re not alone. They wake people up. But protest alone is like shouting into the wind if we don’t combine it with concrete demands. The wealthy who profit from this setup aren’t scared of people yelling in the street; they’re scared of people who know what they want and won’t back down.
So how do we demand what we need? It starts with each of us thinking about what kind of life we want and what we need to live it.
What Every Society Should Provide
Here’s what I think are the basics – the things every decent society should already provide:
- Free healthcare for everyone
- Wages that allow people to live decently
- Housing that regular people can afford
- Healthy, inexpensive food
- Schools that offer a good education at every level – free
- Real care for seniors in their old age, not neglect
- Environmental protections that make sure future generations inherit a livable planet
- An economy that puts people’s wellbeing before profit
These aren’t radical ideas. They’re normal human needs. But we’ve been conditioned to accept less for so long that even saying these out loud makes people nervous. They’ve been told that wanting these things makes them lazy or unrealistic. This is how manipulation works; it keeps people too browbeaten to imagine anything better.
That’s why I liked Grumpy Chinese Guy’s video so much. He wasn’t attacking anyone; he was asking the question that matters most: What’s next? Which to me means: what do we want and how do we get it?
Protest is important. It can spark change through awareness. But awareness alone won’t save us. We have to organize, come up with strategies, and name what we want, because if we don’t, the same wealthy few will keep deciding our futures for us.
We don’t need kings. We don’t need billionaires running our lives. What we need is each other and a government that remembers who it’s for.
Society isn’t a competition. It’s a survival plan.
We’ve been conditioned to accept less for too long. It’s the biggest lie of all, and it’s time to unlearn it.
