Super Bowl and the increasingly large affordability gap in America

Costs are rising so fast that at some point we will start cutting corners in ways that may challenge our moral bearings. Only the super wealthy will be able to enjoy things that used to be commonplace

By Ray Hanania

FREE/Sports rising costs, Decaying World, Soylent Green/ Monday, Feb. 10, 2025

Are we headed towards a “Soylent Green” society?

Remember the 1973 movie starring Charlton Heston as an investigator and Edward G. Robinson as his professor friend and how they accidentally discover in a society ravaged by super high costs, restrictions on rights, and vanishing commodities that the government has started processing the dead into a new form of food?

The world around humanity is fast-dying and only the super wealthy can enjoy things that at one time had been taken for granted. The disparity fuels rising crime, while the world faces food shortages and the vanishing of things that once were taken or granted, like a bath.

The people in that dystopian science fiction drama probably didn’t see the early signs of their decay and destruction until it was too late. Actions had to be taken to make up for all the losses of things we took for granted. Food, wild animals, and resources like fresh water and farmlands were becoming scarce.

The government contracts with a corporation called Soylent to create processed food that is handed out to the mostly impoverished world. As resources for processed food began to vanish, they turned to the processing of one resource that never seems to end in a world of human beings struggling to survive. Death. As long as humans are living and dying, there will be dead bodies. So naturally, the government of this dystopian time finds itself forced to use a new ingredient for the food chips handed out to the people. You got it. Dead bodies, reprocessed in a new food chip called “Soylent Green.”

Me with my brother John at the Chicago Auto Show sometime around 1959 or 1960.

It results in a moment when Robinson is getting tired of the challenges of life and opts into a wonderfully entertaining final stage of life that is essentially euthanasia. You turn yourself in, tired of struggling. They pamper you with a few things like great music wonderful video images of what the world once was, and then you slowly and passively die.

Once dead, the company recoups the costs by processing your remains in the Soylent Green food chip, something kept secret from the impoverished masses for obvious reasons. The act of euthanasia actually serves as a form of population control, to “make room” for future generations of depressed, unimaginative human zombies.

It prompts one of the most iconic moments of the film when Heston, a New York detective investigating the death of a Soylent Corporation executive, discovers what happened to his friend’s body and cries out at the end of the 1973 Hollywood film, “Soylent Green is people!” While in the deceased executive’s home, with a woman who is the apartment’s “furniture,” Heston finds a nearly empty jar of strawberry jam and he licks the jam taste off the spoon in the jar. It was one of the many prized possessions of the wealthy but now-dead Soylent executive, held as a suspected form of bribery.

Ironically, this 1973 film wasn’t set in the distant future. It was set in 2022, which we, as a world just recently passed.

It makes you wonder, what were the “road signs” that humanity casually passed in that dystopian world as people headed towards the ghastly world of processing of dead people for food? What signs were there that humanity missed as the world walked forward toward that dystopian doom? Are we walking the same way, missing signs because we are so consumed by angry polarized politics and world hatred to realize that a “Soylent Green” cliff is just ahead?

Some compare it to the frog in water that is slowly brought to a boil. They didn’t even feel their impending death because they just get used to it until it takes their lives.

That movie is based on the 1966 novel called “Make Room! Make Room!” by writer Harry Harrison. It was one of the stories I studied back in the 1970s after I returned to college at the University of Illinois at Circle Campus from my Vietnam War Era service before I got side-tracked to political writing.

America and the world today are in a pot of slowly boiling water. We haven’t gotten to the end yet nor to the point where we have to start eating the processed deceased, but we are certainly headed in that direction.

We need to take pause to observe the world around us better. It isn’t just things like climactic change, huge wildfires, massive floods, or tsunamis, like the one in 2004 that wiped out in seconds more than 230,000 lives in one gigantic powerful wave of destructive debris that once had been our homes, cars, and play toys. The water didn’t kill people. The junk we built and enjoyed were turned into weapons of death, grinding out the life out of the humans before they would even drown.

What are those roadsigns? Do we not see them, or do we see them and just shrug and accept them?

Some people at this point will quickly say the destruction of our environment is one of those signs. But I think those are destructions that only compound the end. I think the signs are around us today and we don’t care because we are in awe of them. Simple things that change that we accept.

Like one that just washed past us Sunday. It had many roadsigns of our eminent doom that we just don’t bother to fathom, or many deep down fear so much that we don’t want to do or say anything.

A 30-second Super Bowl commercial costs $8 million.

The cost of a Super Bowl seat was so far out of reach for the majority of football fans. More than 76,000 fans who have the wealth (or connections) could purchase a seat at an average cost of $9,365. A loss of demand this year forced prices down to an “affordable rate” of $4,707, on average. Those lucky ones were able to lick the spoon in the bottle of strawberry jam.

Athletes are paid astronomical salaries in the tens of millions. There’s no control whatsoever. The wealthy decide who and what they pay to make more profits, and we just shrug, watching Super Bowl 59 from the comforts of our impoverished lives.

It’s relative, I tell you.

I remember the first Super Bowl, Jan. 15, 1967. It was a big deal. Green Bay versus Kansas City. Back then the ticket only cost $12 to see that game, and it didn’t even sell out.

Today, we are a society that has learned — or been taught — to accept things as they worsen. It creates a futilistic attitude of non-questioning acceptance. We take what we get and we adjust our dreams downward to what is achievable. The signs pass us as we are distracted by other emotion-driven issues. Death. War. Credit card debt. The cost of eggs, Cable TV and cars.

Do you think the Chicago Auto Show is there to help you see the future of automotives? No. That’s naive. It’s there to help raise the bar on costs in an acceptable manner so the corporations, robber barons, and the thieves of industry redefine what is acceptable. The water temperature is steadily rising around us and if we can swim we think e are living the American Dream. Throw in patriotism, a boogeyman in the form of terrorists or political extremism, and it becomes even easier.

The Chicago Auto Show began in 1901 and has instead of fueling our imaginations, it has smothered it, creating vehicles that are so expensive they are out of reach of most everyday people. Have you noticed we are driving our cars longer that we have in the past. The costs are so outrageous they are certainly much higher than the annual income that designates a family of four as being at the “poverty level” — $15,000 for one and $5,000 added for each additional family member. The Poverty Level is not a “level” at all, but an adjustment.

The average national income is only $66,000.

Most of the “good” cars cost far more, $50,000 plus the taxes and “extras.”

That’s another sign. It used to be a person who made $4,500 a year in the 1960s was doing well and could easily afford a new and impressive car that cost about $1,200.

Take a moment to look around you. You are already being fed “Soylent Green” of another form, the death and reprocessing of our rights as Americans, as human beings.

The Super Bowl is just a spoon with the taste of strawberry jam for the wealthy that is vanishing as fast as are the eggs.

Today’s Soylent Corporation executives — and there are many — know that they have you by the short hairs, and you can’t do a damn thing about it. You just go along drinking the Kool-Aid of anger, emotion, and political hatred. They allow the illegals to enter the country because it becomes the battlefield distraction everyone fights over but nothing changes. How long have they been fighting over it and not resolving it? They don’t want to resolve it. They want you to be fighting over it.

The signs are there. You just have to stop. Open up your mind. And then, open up your eyes.