Funny you say that about the Irish that migrated here…
I’m aporoximately half Italian by heritage, and from what I know of my own family, and uh, general Italian American culture… uh fucking yeah, yep, same thing lol!
Where we differ is that… yeah, to a great extent, we are a bit uniquely fucked by our systems…
But I spent the better part of two decades getting a Poli Sci and an Econ degree, being involved at tons of ground level political stuff…
… and almost nobody fucking cared, back during Obama, back when we actually had a realistic shot and altering the institutional inertia of those systems.
We could not reform the electoral college, which doomed us to the Imperial Presidency.
We did not repeal the PATRIOT ACT, now everyone who thinks wrong is a terrorist sympathizer.
We did not countermand Citizens United, now our government is wholly corrupt, bought and paid for by corporations and their boards of directors.
We did not implement a ranked choice voting paradigm that would have made it much, much harder for the Republicans to keep their power, to keep gerrymandering and rigging out voting systems.
That was it, the Obama years, historically speaking, that was our shot!
And we missed it.
I told everyone I knew that what is happening right now was a very likely outcome if we didn’t achieve those things at that time.
And almost everyone I knew called me paranoid, delusional, hysterical.
… So no, the problem is Americans.
We are too high on our own supply, we’ve been huffing our own farts for so long that we just assumed we were immune to the broader forces of history.
We still barely even manage to get half the population to vote, for the President, and local and State level election turnout numbers are way worse.
We don’t care, it isn’t cool to care.
De Tocqueville rather importantly notes that a well informed and educated, and politically engaged populace is required for democracy to work.
What he saw in America was a kind of practical communalism, everyone knows and interacts with and is willing to coordinate with their neighbors and their town… thats how he described our fledgling republic.
But we abstracted that all away, got lost in our own propoganda amd gadgets and doodads, and now its all blowing up in our faces.
Trump is a symptom of a deeply anti-intellectual and religious fundamentalist streak that consistently runs through our history, and no one ever really bothered to do anything systemic about this, even though its implications are obvious.
Don’t get me wrong, our systems are fucked, but we had so many chances to do… anything else, anything other than neoliberal phantasmagoria as a political ethos… we had so many people, and stories, and signs, and artists! all pointing out our own hypocrisy… and we basically just sung along and pantomimed being rebels that could change the system, as corporate America just turned that into another marketable demographic, and very very few ‘hippies’ and ‘rebels’ and ‘punks’ realized that is what happened.
Sorry, I losing focus, starting to fall asleep, but basically uh… no we Americans fucking suck, trust me, I probably know more of them than you, haha!
EDIT: Oh right, I’ll have to check out Red Box, cam’t say I’ve heard of them!
I can’t argue with anything you’ve said. Indoctrination is very hard to break out of, and it starts at a young age in the USA (if the people I followed when I was on TikTok are accurate). Singing the anthem at school, hanging the flag (we never saw flags at school here until St. Patrick’s Day), being told USA is the greatest and that other countries want to be like the USA, that it’s the land of the free … all indoctrination. I’d go as far as to call it brainwashing.
We’re fragile creatures (Fragile, by Sting, since we have a musical theme going!). It’s hard to contend with such an onslaught. I don’t blame people for that. I’m curious, what did it for you? How did you begin to see the wood from the trees?
I came from a highly patriotic, religious fundamentalist family.
Unfortunately for them… I am also very inquisitive, very curious, pretty autistic, and very good at analysis.
The cracks were subtle at first… but they could not be ignored… the more I took it upon myself to learn… the worse it got, in terms of upholding the false reality.
I couldn’t pinpoint an exact thing or moment.
Maybe it really was watching the Matrix… a barely describable unease, sense that something… is wrong… a splinter, in my mind, driving me mad.
I was talking, with people from all around the world, in realtime, in the early 2000s, taught myself how to code, read voraciously, did well in school, got those two degrees… at the same time, just had to do either one or two extra summer quarters to finish in 4 years, went to work in corpo america, bounced off of its bullshit rather rapidly, went to non profits, to be able to use my skillset but not feel morally disgusted with myself.
I do remember one thing… walking to work one day.
A lump, of blankets, in the alley near the downtown corporate hq i worked at.
… huh.
Work.
Lunch.
Time enough for a bit of a walk.
Pass by that same alley.
The lump is gone. In its place, there is a … stain.
And there are city workers, with flamethrowers, burning it away.
Sterilizing it.
Because it was the remnants of a decaying, human corpse.
I think it may have been that moment that I realized our society does not give one fuck for the poor and homeless… and that at that point in time… my job was ultimately to facilitate the grander processes that led to that person’s likely avoidable death.
Which is why the Republicans intentionally misunderstand, infantilize and demonize the first, and destroy the latter.
We are down to about an 85% literacy rate now.
Average American reads at a 6th grade level, less than 5% can actually do critical analysis, compare and contrast different news stories covering the same event/story.
Funny you say that about the Irish that migrated here…
I’m aporoximately half Italian by heritage, and from what I know of my own family, and uh, general Italian American culture… uh fucking yeah, yep, same thing lol!
Where we differ is that… yeah, to a great extent, we are a bit uniquely fucked by our systems…
But I spent the better part of two decades getting a Poli Sci and an Econ degree, being involved at tons of ground level political stuff…
… and almost nobody fucking cared, back during Obama, back when we actually had a realistic shot and altering the institutional inertia of those systems.
We could not reform the electoral college, which doomed us to the Imperial Presidency.
We did not repeal the PATRIOT ACT, now everyone who thinks wrong is a terrorist sympathizer.
We did not countermand Citizens United, now our government is wholly corrupt, bought and paid for by corporations and their boards of directors.
We did not implement a ranked choice voting paradigm that would have made it much, much harder for the Republicans to keep their power, to keep gerrymandering and rigging out voting systems.
That was it, the Obama years, historically speaking, that was our shot!
And we missed it.
I told everyone I knew that what is happening right now was a very likely outcome if we didn’t achieve those things at that time.
And almost everyone I knew called me paranoid, delusional, hysterical.
… So no, the problem is Americans.
We are too high on our own supply, we’ve been huffing our own farts for so long that we just assumed we were immune to the broader forces of history.
We still barely even manage to get half the population to vote, for the President, and local and State level election turnout numbers are way worse.
We don’t care, it isn’t cool to care.
De Tocqueville rather importantly notes that a well informed and educated, and politically engaged populace is required for democracy to work.
What he saw in America was a kind of practical communalism, everyone knows and interacts with and is willing to coordinate with their neighbors and their town… thats how he described our fledgling republic.
But we abstracted that all away, got lost in our own propoganda amd gadgets and doodads, and now its all blowing up in our faces.
Trump is a symptom of a deeply anti-intellectual and religious fundamentalist streak that consistently runs through our history, and no one ever really bothered to do anything systemic about this, even though its implications are obvious.
Don’t get me wrong, our systems are fucked, but we had so many chances to do… anything else, anything other than neoliberal phantasmagoria as a political ethos… we had so many people, and stories, and signs, and artists! all pointing out our own hypocrisy… and we basically just sung along and pantomimed being rebels that could change the system, as corporate America just turned that into another marketable demographic, and very very few ‘hippies’ and ‘rebels’ and ‘punks’ realized that is what happened.
Sorry, I losing focus, starting to fall asleep, but basically uh… no we Americans fucking suck, trust me, I probably know more of them than you, haha!
EDIT: Oh right, I’ll have to check out Red Box, cam’t say I’ve heard of them!
I can’t argue with anything you’ve said. Indoctrination is very hard to break out of, and it starts at a young age in the USA (if the people I followed when I was on TikTok are accurate). Singing the anthem at school, hanging the flag (we never saw flags at school here until St. Patrick’s Day), being told USA is the greatest and that other countries want to be like the USA, that it’s the land of the free … all indoctrination. I’d go as far as to call it brainwashing.
We’re fragile creatures (Fragile, by Sting, since we have a musical theme going!). It’s hard to contend with such an onslaught. I don’t blame people for that. I’m curious, what did it for you? How did you begin to see the wood from the trees?
I came from a highly patriotic, religious fundamentalist family.
Unfortunately for them… I am also very inquisitive, very curious, pretty autistic, and very good at analysis.
The cracks were subtle at first… but they could not be ignored… the more I took it upon myself to learn… the worse it got, in terms of upholding the false reality.
I couldn’t pinpoint an exact thing or moment.
Maybe it really was watching the Matrix… a barely describable unease, sense that something… is wrong… a splinter, in my mind, driving me mad.
I was talking, with people from all around the world, in realtime, in the early 2000s, taught myself how to code, read voraciously, did well in school, got those two degrees… at the same time, just had to do either one or two extra summer quarters to finish in 4 years, went to work in corpo america, bounced off of its bullshit rather rapidly, went to non profits, to be able to use my skillset but not feel morally disgusted with myself.
I do remember one thing… walking to work one day.
A lump, of blankets, in the alley near the downtown corporate hq i worked at.
… huh.
Work.
Lunch.
Time enough for a bit of a walk.
Pass by that same alley.
The lump is gone. In its place, there is a … stain.
And there are city workers, with flamethrowers, burning it away.
Sterilizing it.
Because it was the remnants of a decaying, human corpse.
I think it may have been that moment that I realized our society does not give one fuck for the poor and homeless… and that at that point in time… my job was ultimately to facilitate the grander processes that led to that person’s likely avoidable death.
The ‘tism can be a great asset for seeing through BS, along with education.
Which is why the Republicans intentionally misunderstand, infantilize and demonize the first, and destroy the latter.
We are down to about an 85% literacy rate now.
Average American reads at a 6th grade level, less than 5% can actually do critical analysis, compare and contrast different news stories covering the same event/story.