Toxin and Antidote

Being raised as an ordinary working American is like being slipped a powerful but slow acting toxin, to which there is a common antidote. Sadly for the ordinary American, that antidote is a controlled substance, and is maintained in artificially short supply. And there are rules attached to its distribution, chief among them that an ordinary person must put in four to six decades of work in order to prove worthy to receive it. By the end of that period of time, the regular ills associated with staying in place, overworking a body evolved to wander, eating poorly, caring for one's own toxified children and taking meager entertainment have caught up with all but the worst of the allegedly best and brightest. And the distributors of the antidote, being frugal sorts when it comes to other people's existences, decide instead to find worthier recipients, leaving the strugglers and just barely survivors to find less effective amelioration for their poisoning.